a failure of sense making

new book alert

Sorry for the non-appearance of Friday’s post last week – I got a stinking cold. I now have a bit of a backlog, because I want to respond to comments on that, but I also want to talk about actual uses of AI in the wild, and such like. But I’m delaying these because there’s a new book coming out which I saw an advance copy of and which is now available for pre-order, and it’s really good.

https://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Engineering-Time-Tested-Turning-Clarity/dp/0306836866

It’s called “Crisis Engineering”, and it’s by Marina Nitze (who used to run the Department of Veterans’ Affairs technology team that’s discussed in Recoding America) and two of her colleagues. For the most part, it’s a practical handbook of “what you need to do in a crisis”, but for that reason it’s really a book about “what you need to know about crises in order to react well when you’re in one”.

For a while now, I’ve had this recurring comedy bit that the reason you ought to take Stafford Beer’s management cybernetics seriously is that when left to themselves, intelligent engineers faced with a management problem will almost always reinvent about fifty per cent of “Brain of the Firm” without ever having heard of it. I would say that “Crisis Engineering” is very much a book in that tradition.

The title of this post is taken from what I see as the central idea of the book – that a crisis is a “failure of sense-making”. That’s what distinguishes a crisis from things just generally sucking a bit. It’s the same thing that Stafford Beer was reaching for when he said that ““What counts as a crisis is the expectation of loss of control; in other words, cybernetic breakdown in an institution.”

In other words, crisis is a state of exception. It’s defined as a situation in which doing the normal things will not produce the normal results. It’s a restructuring of the black box, if you will, the connection of inputs to outputs. The root of a crisis is often a past mistake of information architecture; something which you had “attenuated” in order to pay attention to the things which really matter, turns out to really, really matter. (The book has a really nice discussion of the Three Mile Island disaster, which can be traced to a stuck steam valve).

And so, the crucial step in crisis engineering is to re-establish a common view which corresponds to reality – to restore sense-making. Once that step has been taken, actually solving the problem becomes a tractable task, and without it nothing is going to work. There’s a lot of specific advice on how you can go about doing this, organising teams to do so, and so on, because it’s a practical handbook, but I think that’s the big philosophical point.

It tracks with my personal experience of financial crises. As I think I’ve mentioned before on this ‘stack, this was my niche when I was a banker. In normal conditions I was barely able to do the job, but when the world went mad there were few that could touch me. (The joke always was that, in the words of one market-maker I worked with “the thing I like about Dan is that he’s crap, but when it all goes to hell, he doesn’t get any worse”). But the two were linked. The reason that I prospered in crises was exactly that I spent all my time chasing up weird and interesting-looking trivia instead of concentrating on doing the job properly. Which meant that I was able to re-establish sense-making quicker.

Which means that I think the underlying moral (which I am going to write a lot more about, not least because I have a book contract to do so!) is that the crucial step in reacting to a crisis is that of understanding that you are in a crisis. The important property of the system is the ability to notice a discrepancy between the world and its mental model, and to take it seriously. Almost every post-mortem of an industrial tragedy seems to begin with something ignored which is retrospectively obvious.

Anyway, this marks something of a record for me, having not only written a book review without procrastination, but done so before it actually came out! It’s a very good book – my blurb quote is “This is the book I wish every single boss I ever worked for had on their desk”, but there are much better recommendations from much more prestigious people. I’ll leave you with Stafford Beer’s guide to managing a crisis. I’ve posted it before, but I’ll probably post it again because it’s so fantastic.