Escalating Scenarios: A Deep Dive Into Outage Pitfalls

When things go wrong, our judgement is clouded at best, blinded at worst.

In order to successfully navigate a large-scale outage, being aware of potentials gaps in knowledge and context can help make for a better outcome. The Human Factors and Systems Safety community have been studying how people situate themselves, coordinate amongst a team, use tooling, make decisions, and keep their cool under sometimes very stressful and escalating scenarios. We can learn from this research in order to adopt a more mature stance when the s*#t hits the fan.

We’re going to look closely at how people behave under these circumstances using real-world examples and scan what we can learn from High Reliability Organizations(HROs) and fields such as aviation, military, and trauma-driven healthcare.