“Here be dragons.”
This was the lecture I had travelled to Portugal to hear: my rock star, David Woods, speaking on resilience engineering.
It was the second morning of the conference, and we were back in the main auditorium. I was seated in my normal spot, the center of the back row. The breeze drifting in from the garden through the side doors cooled my skin (and the room, still warm from the afternoon before) ever so slightly. Outside birds chirped, leaves rustled, and the occasional car horn blared.
Dr. Woods’ lecture began along the usual lines: we live in an adaptive universe* and this universe has basic rules, but these rules aren’t always what you think they are. All systems have finite resources and change is constant; this, combined with our misunderstanding of ‘the rules’ and the interconnectedness of our systems lead to unexpected consequences (a.k.a. surprises). And, most important, if you wait until you are surprised to take action, it is already too late.
So, the question became, how do we prepare ourselves to be surprised? Surprise happens, he posited, at system boundaries. These boundaries are ill-defined, and are often based on incomplete information. Thus it is hard to know where the borders of safe operations are. To add to the challenge, these boundaries move around, and if there is a boundary, there is something beyond the boundary. “Here be dragons”, the slide stated, just below a medieval image of a pair of fire-breathing reptiles guarding a stone wall. We were getting to the good stuff.**
The answer, Dr. Woods posed (and I was here to hear it!), is unease. We should be uneasy with our complex and precarious systems, we should be uneasy with the plans, procedures, automation and rules we use to support them, we should be uneasy with the constant adjustments our systems require of us to remain stable. We need to be uneasy with our constant drive for optimality, to better match our response capability to what happens (be, as he called it, regularly irregular), to become better at anticipating and preparing for crunches. We need to maintain this unease, he continued, so we are alert and can recognize, adapt and effectively respond to unexpected events.
But wait! What was this? Have my eyes, itchy from lack of sleep, suddenly become heavy? No No No No No! This cannot be happening.
I sit up straight, slap my cheeks to wake myself up, and double down on taking notes. I. Will. Not. Fall. Asleep. During. This. Talk.
And for a few minutes I am fine. But the breeze over my shoulders is now warm, and my eyes become harder and harder to keep open. I tell myself it is okay to just listen, just for a minute.
What? I missed a slide? My eyes are wide open. I am frantically scribbling notes, determined to stay awake. But my body betrays me: my eyes are so heavy, the room so warm, the dim lights of the auditorium soooooo invite me to slumber. My eyes close again.
And with that, the eleven hours of sleep I’ve had over the past four nights catch up with me, and I am out, blissfully napping in the back row of the lecture hall.
* Dr. Woods uses the term ‘adaptive universe’ to describe environments that are constantly evolving in response to small changes.
** At this point my proofreader shared “Ever since I learned Genesis 3:24 I have suspected that the good stuff was usually beyond something involving fire. Like the Advanced Propulsion course in 1974.”