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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I describe the implications of substitution myth, how it makes things more difficult when people need to step in to deal with situations the Al agent cant cope with, right at the time they are least prepared to do so. www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/2026/10/02/t...

adaptivecapacitylabs.com

The substitution myth & the tough spot it puts us in

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

You are looking for the field of Cognitive Systems Engineering www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/what-is-cogn...

adaptivecapacitylabs.com

What is Cognitive Systems Engineering?

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

"The reaction to failure is not a linear function of the weight or impact of the failure. We have seen lower impact failures produce stronger reactions than high impact ones." www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/2026/03/07/o...

adaptivecapacitylabs.com

Organizational Second Hit Syndrome

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Fred Hebert @ferd.ca · 21/12/2024

The people behind and part of this community have been a huge influence on my own learning and progression around systems thinking and resilience engineering. I’m glad to see the community organizing itself—and to be a member of it all.

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · 20/01/2026

Resilience engineering is about how successful systems are able to modify themselves to deal with a shock that is outside of what they can handle. This video by David Woods illustrates this phenomenon using the real-life example of an ER dealing with an influx of burn patients. youtu.be/duNMGTmZ4FA

youtu.be

Resilience Engineering 101: Part 11 Beyond Surge Capacity

YouTube video by CSEL BackChannel

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Fred Hebert @ferd.ca · 22/01/2026

Part of Resilience Engineering is knowing Compensation happens, and knowing how to protect, foster, and build on this type of capacity to keep systems successful; keeping it invisible increases the chances it reaches saturation, and fails in a cascade. Posted on @resilienceinsoftware.org

resilienceinsoftware.org

Decompensation and Cascading Failures

Consider the following scenario: A set of automated tasks has somehow failed to run to completion. Because a thorough fix will take some time and the tasks you need run are time-sensitive, you complet...

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

Folks who would respond that way completely misunderstand the concept. ‘blameless’ doesn’t mean “getting off the hook” or not accountable. Ugh.

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

Does anyone have first-hand experience with using an AI agent that has “participated” in the response to an actual incident in a genuinely diagnostic — or otherwise contextually-specific way?

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

Comedy is about taking chances, Av. You took a chance.

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

There are a couple of phrases I genuinely despise. One of them is "...we're at an inflection point..." 1. That's not how inflection points work. 2. Hindsight's a helluva drug, isn't it? 3. Just say you are at a loss to explain some recent surprises. It's honest and not unnecessarily dramatic.

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

Hi, 👋 that right there, is me.

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

For leaders with expectations about how more productive, efficient, etc. the software engineers in their org will be with AI: 1. How are you handling the "Left-Over Principle" challenges? 2. Also: customer comms about the incidents involving code produced AI? (Seems clear #2 is depends on #1)

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Will Gallego @gallego.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

Another real life demonstration of Ironies of Automation

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · 28/07/2025

Incidents happen because people do things that have always worked successfully, up until the incident. Doing something that always worked in the past is completely rational!

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

Come on, @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com. You and I talked about the hindsight bias trap on your podcast. Don’t also fall for this trap as well: www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/2021/08/22/w...

adaptivecapacitylabs.com

What makes public posts about incidents different from analysis write-ups

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

Yes, and when inevitably: “Oh…huh…whoa, how come you’re doing it like that?” They’ve got a story for you. 😀

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

As if there was any other route!

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

1. PEOPLE keep things working. 2. When things break down, PEOPLE work to make the consequences much less than they might have been otherwise. Both dynamics are, for the most part, invisible to management. (via @lauramaguire.bsky.social's dissertation)

As Richard Cook notes, in reflecting on the data collected from the SNAFU Catchers Consortium:
"It's hard to know who is monitoring the system, who is looking at things, and who is available.
We know for certain in (some organizations) that there is a pretty well defined group of people who are in high-frequency update mode more or less continuously while awake. This is a huge contributor to reducing the costs of coordination and it is invisible to everyone and therefore not on any dashboard." (Cook, personal communication)

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Erika Rowland @erikareads.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

I recently read the paper "Towards Joint Activity Design Heuristics: Essentials for Human-Machine Teaming" which I loved so much I wanted to make it easier to share. To that end, I've excerpted the Ten Heuristics from the paper here: human-machine.team with anchors for each heuristic.

human-machine.team

Ten Machine Requirements To Satisfy Essentials Of Joint Activity

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

What a great podcast! Honored to be talking about Resilience Engineering with @colettecello.bsky.social and @spamaps.org!

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Adaptive Capacity Labs @adaptivecapacity.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

Two years ago, at the first LFI Conference, we spoke alongside a client of ours (Indeed) about the amazing progress they had made in learning effectively from incidents. This is what "good" looks like with respect to learning effectively from incidents. www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/2025/02/28/w...

adaptivecapacitylabs.com

What Progress In Learning From Incidents Actually Looks Like

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This is Fine! @thisisfinepod.com · 25/02/2025

@allspaw.bsky.social joined us last week to help contrast ITIL's approach of "Counting and tabulating incidents" with the resilience engineering way of looking directly at the messy reality underneath them. www.youtube.com/watch?v=cimc...

youtube.com

Episode 10 - When They go Full ITIL on You w/special guest John Allspaw

YouTube video by thisisfinepodcast

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

What a great podcast! Honored to be talking about Resilience Engineering with @colettecello.bsky.social and @spamaps.org!

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

Very few know we've (@adaptivecapacity.bsky.social) been developing tools to help support us. After 7 years & 6 patents (!) we realized others were interested in integrating/commercializing "Churchkey." We’re looking for partners interested in licensing Churchkey's IP. churchkey.info

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Praveen Kottarathil @praveenkp.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

Beyond just the language setting ourselves up for failure, "root cause" have deeper issues. For me it triggers anxiety everytime i hear it. @allspaw.bsky.social has articulated it very well the issues here. Recommended material for SRE-201: github.com/readme/guide...

github.com

What we talk about when we talk about ‘root cause’

Instead of finding the ‘root cause’ to incidents and issues, @allspaw says it’s more accurate to try and break down what created the ‘perfect storm’:

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · 29/01/2025

The beauty of your incident categorization scene is no match for the messiness of the real world.

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Colette Alexander @colettecello.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

I am so excited to announce the Resilience in Software Foundation - a project we've been working on for awhile now. 💜

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This is Fine! @thisisfinepod.com · 22/01/2025

Hey folks, new episode up today! Come listen to us chat with @courtneynash.bsky.social about the ironies of automation, AI, HABA-MABA, and the impending job shortage of people who can grok how AI broke it... youtu.be/i4qMmp6-hXg

youtu.be

Episode 7 - AI and Resilience with special guest Courtney Nash

YouTube video by thisisfinepodcast

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

It's such a feel to watch the eyes of people who've had their light switched on when they discover seminal works on understanding expertise! (or that such research is even a thing!)

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

A talk I gave last year at SRECon Americas, "Real Talk: What We Think We Know — That Just Ain’t So" about the importance of thinking deliberately and critically about our assumptions, and admitting when we get things wrong... www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/2025/01/07/r...

adaptivecapacitylabs.com

Revisiting What We Think We Already Know

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

In 2015, I attended my first Resilience Engineering Symposium. I felt excited and nervous sharing our domain of software with such accomplished audience. A decade later, I’m part of a fast-growing community of others in software passionate about RE, committed to creating a better future.

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

On the one hand, it’s impressive you found that slide deck. On the other hand, it’s tough to say what (if anything!) I got right in that presentation…definitely not that slide :)

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

bsky.app/profile/alls... 🫡

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

who worries that if it *doesn't* go smoothly, that "heads" might "roll," whose spouse or partner shares in the slightly-higher-level-of-anxiety this time of year brings... Know that we at @adaptivecapacity.bsky.social see you, understand you, and are thinking about you. ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🖤

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

…who know the exact location and schedule of their teammates this week, who gave out land-line numbers to their teammates *just in case*, who knows that if everything goes smoothly, only a few others will have any idea what went into that being even a remote possibility…

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

…who are nervous because it's their first "cyber monday," who are worried about their vendors holding up their end of the deal, who are hoping all of the necessary alerts are enabled and none of the unnecessary ones are, who are rechecking the capacity planning spreadsheet(s)…

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Repeating from past years: This week is significant. To those of you who are on-call during this week and next, who are schlepping your laptop to Thanksgiving, who will have 2nd thoughts about that glass of wine or cocktail this Thursday or next Sunday night…

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John Allspaw @allspaw.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Mean, median, percentiles…they all make a very bold assumption that all units of time are equal in all dimensions that matter. And of course I hope this is obvious: they aren’t. 😀

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Andy Fleener @andyfleener.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Compulsatory: www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/2021/01/11/u...

adaptivecapacitylabs.com

Understanding Incidents: Three Analytical Traps

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Steven Shorrock @stevenshorrock.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Bill Hicks is so missed. So ahead of his time. Lost far too young. youtu.be/tHEOGrkhDp0?...

youtu.be

Bill Hicks on Marketing

YouTube video by Tyrell Edwards

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