Cohort 1

Crisis engineering is the art of restructuring core technical systems and organizational functions during times of peak urgency.

Carla Geisser

Matthew Weaver

Mikey Dickerson

Marina Nitze

Crisis Engineering

A crisis presents an unmatched opportunity for percussive, positive change in organizations and systems of any scale. To differentiate from “incidents,” or “failures,” crises require transformation to make progress. This is because old maps or processes are rendered insufficient, or old systems cannot be maintained or restored. Big influences will be the sensemaking papers by Karl Weick &amp;co (e.g. "Sensemaking in Organizations","High Reliability Organizing"), the systems safety/STAMP work from Nancy Leveson (e.g. "Engineering a Safer World", the THERAC-25 paper), and ancient stone tablets on organizational science (e.g. Anthony Downs). We'll distill the most valuable parts of these big, heavy, well-studied frameworks and recontextualize them in the (somewhat) less bureaucratic environment that most technologists work in nowadays. We'll lead you through techniques from healthcare.gov, tiny startups and other places we've helped. Since this is a cohort class, we welcome your stories and will use participant case studies to guide discussion. We welcome individual technologists who work across systems and organizations, as well as leaders familiar with how technology projects are specified and managed. We'll be discussing organizational dynamics, no particular language or technical stack background is required. Questions? email us at team@layeraleph.com

Lead your team through a crisis

Executives who want to catalyze lasting change after a crisis.

Leaders who want to hone their skills at handling the unexpected.

Practitioners (SWEs and SREs) who want best practices for sensemaking in novel circumstances.

Who is this course for

What you’ll get out of this course

"Grant me the sense of proportion to judge the difference between an incident and a crisis.”

Clarity on what is a crisis

You can only fix things if you know what's going on.

Tools for sensemaking during a crisis

We've read all the papers in this area and can share the highlights.

Theory on how organizations learn during a crisis

A crisis can be a catalyst of substantial organizational change.

How to make systemic change

Provide a brief description for each module as a way to sell the value of what students will be learning throughout the course.

First Module

Second Module

Third Module

Course syllabus

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday

Course schedule

This course builds on live workshops and hands-on projects

Active hands-on learning

You’ll be interacting with other learners through breakout rooms and project teams

Interactive and project-based

Join a community of like-minded people who want to learn and grow alongside you

Learn with a cohort of peers

Learning is better with cohorts

Meet your instructors

Frequently Asked Questions

This is a key opportunity to demonstrate the transformation that students will achieve if they choose to enroll in your course. Why is it worth it to them?

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About this course

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