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 &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