Presentation: Whispers in the Chaos: Monitoring Weak Signals

The complexity of the socio-technical systems we engineer, operate, and exist within is staggering. Due to our daily interactions with and familiarity with our systems, the true gravity of this complexity can become easy to ignore. (And... let's face it, as a good coping strategy, too!) When those systems falter or fail, we often find in the postmortems and retrospectives afterward that there were "weak signals" that portended doom, but we didn't know they were there or how to sense them. 

In this talk, we'll look at what the safety sciences have to say about humans operating complex socio-technical systems, including what aircraft carriers have to do with Internet infrastructure operations, how resilience engineering can help us, and the role heuristics play in incident response. All of these provide insight into ways we can improve one the most advanced—and most effective—monitoring tools we have available to keep those systems running: ourselves.