---
id: "workshop:crisis-engineering-for-public-officials"
type: "InnovateUS workshop"
title: "Crisis Engineering for Public Officials"
url: "https://innovate-us.org/crisis-engineering-for-public-officials"
date: "2024-11-19"
duration: "60 minutes"
language: "English"
instructors: ["Marina Nitze","Carla Geisser","Mikey Dickerson","Matthew Weaver"]
recording: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55RL48d1Y0g"
transcript: "automatic, from the recording"
source: "InnovateUS (innovate-us.org)"
licence: "CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), as stated on innovate-us.org"
---

# Crisis Engineering for Public Officials

InnovateUS workshop · 19 November 2024 · 60 minutes

In times of crisis, how can public officials respond effectively while navigating the complexities of government structures? The answer lies in understanding and applying the principles of “crisis engineering.” This workshop will introduce participants to innovative approaches for identifying crises, managing towards resolution, and making the most of the opportunity for changes that are impossible under normal operations..

Join InnovateUS experts for a hands-on session that explores the fundamentals of bureaucracy hacking and crisis engineering. Drawing on real-world examples, this workshop will illustrate how public officials can build resilience into their processes, enabling them to respond adeptly to emergencies. Whether dealing with natural disasters, public health issues, or other urgent challenges, you’ll learn how to anticipate problems, act swiftly, and drive impactful solutions, even within the constraints of government systems.

This session is designed for public officials who face the challenges of crisis management daily. Participants will leave with actionable skills and insights that can be applied immediately to their work, helping to bridge the information gap between technical experts and the broader public sector.

## Learning goals

- Understand the principles of crisis engineering and its role in government response
- Explore practical applications of bureaucracy hacking to streamline crisis management efforts
- Learn best practices for ethical crisis intervention in the public sector
- Gain insights from real-world case studies on effective crisis response

## Speakers

- **Marina Nitze**, Crisis Engineer, Layer Aleph
- **Carla Geisser**, Former SRE lead, Google + US Digital Service
- **Mikey Dickerson**, Crisis Engineer, Layer Aleph
- **Matthew Weaver**, Crisis Engineer, Layer Aleph

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55RL48d1Y0g

## Transcript

Automatic transcript of the recording: names and terms can be misheard, and the times can be a few seconds off. Each time links to that moment of the video. The transcript alone: https://innovate-us.org/crisis-engineering-for-public-officials.txt (plain text) and https://innovate-us.org/crisis-engineering-for-public-officials.json (every segment with its start and end second).

**Mikey Dickerson**

[0:00](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=0) Hello. Zoom just changed the entire layout again. Oh well. I can see a couple of you. Weaver or Andrew or Travis, give me a thumbs up if you see slides that say Crisis Engineering for Public Officials. Fantastic. We're off to a big start. Thank you to our hosts Innovate US for giving us the chance to talk to you all today and I'm glad you all could be here. I see one or two names in the participant list here that I know so hello to those of you who I know and the rest of you. Good to meet you. We're going to do, I say this every time because it's true every time, you're going to have to bear with us a little bit if this gets jumbled or out of order because we put this together specifically for this audience. It's material that we know very well but we are trying to condense a two to three day workshop that we teach into an hour and recently we feel like the two to three day workshop isn't enough. So we're going to give it a shot. I'm just going to kind of tell you the main story and try to make sure that we finish in time for questions. So here's what I'm going to, here's what Weaver and I and Marina when she gets here are going to try to talk about. We're going to try to cover what are we talking about when we use the words crisis engineering at all. What does culture mean? Why is it habits and what can we do about it? What habits as it turns out are performed mostly on autopilot is the case we're going to make. There are small occasional windows when the autopilot is turned off and those are what you might use the word crisis to describe. It's not perfect but you might use the word crisis to describe those opportunities. And then we're going to make the case that those opportunity windows are the times when you can make rapid directed lasting durable change. Those are the

[2:03](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=123) only times you can do that is our thesis. So oh and I've got a chat window open. I will do my best to keep it keeps scrolling out of my view. So if you've got a question go ahead and put it in the chat anytime you want. I'll do my best. Otherwise you can use the raise hand doodad which would be good to find that button because I'm going to be calling on you to use that response. It's called reactions apparently at the bottom of the screen. On my screen I've got a little heart icon that says reactions. So locate that button because I'm going to be looking for you to use it in a second. So great off we go. So crisis engineering is some words that we made up. Here's why we are people that did that kind of didn't we fell into the jobs that we do more or less by accident. By a lot of trial and error we became we acquired the reputation of being people that are reasonably good at a certain class of problems. We don't claim to be perfect at it. We also don't claim to be good at all problems but there's some things we're reasonably good at solving and they seem to have some common aspects to them. They seem to have kind of an aroma of crisis around them. So some of the things that we've been most effective at are healthcare.gov, some work we did during the COVID pandemic for the state of California, situations for government agencies that are like extremely large backlogs, things that are in the news, things that have got a lot of attention that are stressing people out. That's the kind of thing that we end up working on. Customers have suggested to us that the thing we are doing is unique. We hear more often than anything else at the end of a job that why like you guys are completely unlike other vendors that we have worked with. Why? Like how did you learn to do this? What is it that you do? It really would be interesting to us, our customers saying this, it really would be interesting

[4:06](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=246) to us if you could like write that down and explain it in some way so that maybe we could make some use of it. So we went off and thought about that. We made up a label of crisis engineering which again I don't think is perfect at conveying what we want to convey but all of the other options that we considered were also not perfect and so we picked one and moved on. What we're actually trying to describe, the way I'm thinking about it these days, the way we're thinking about it these days, is it doesn't necessarily have to talk about a crisis in the sense that you're probably thinking of that word. What we mean is kind of a approach, tool bag, whatever, a framework that will help you to identify the situations where you're going to get maximum leverage for the work you're going to do and make the most use of them. So if you would prefer to roll boulders downhill where a little bit of work causes a lot of output, sometimes in a pretty chaotic way as when rolling boulders downhill I suppose, if you'd prefer to do that than roll boulders uphill an inch at a time for years then we have some suggestions for how to get that. Our approach will not work for all situations. It will not work against all problems. You know, consult your doctor before starting an exercise program, blah blah blah blah.

[5:31](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=331) We don't think we have the answer to everything. We think we have the answer to a piece of the puzzle that doesn't get talked about very much so we hope it is useful to you. So I warned you that I was going to ask for your reaction buttons. This is a warm-up. Push your thumbs up or something if anybody has come to you and said culture eats strategy for breakfast, possibly when you were trying to accomplish something. Ah, oh, I didn't know where to look. Yes, I see. Very good. I see 15. I got one thumbs down. I'm going to take that to mean that you've heard it and it was annoying. I agree. So all right, the interface is a little weird but we'll run with it. Okay, I have heard that plenty of times. Very often when I was working in the White House, someone would wander in and say this and then wander out again and I found it not particularly helpful. The annoying thing about it is that it's kind of, I mean, it's true in kind of an obvious aphorism kind of way.

[6:35](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=395) It was, but the people who say it don't usually follow it up with anything. It's not like, therefore, this is what you should do about the culture. It's just, well, your strategy isn't going to work because culture, which I'm like, thank you. And that's about as useful as if I was trying to build an airplane and somebody wandered in with their coffee mug every 15 minutes and said, well, you know, gravity is never going to go away. And it's like, thanks. Yes, I'm aware that is the thing that we're trying to work against right now. So if we examine that kind of attitude a little bit, which you've all encountered and try to figure out what it means exactly. Here's an attempt. It means something. There's not like, culture isn't like a scientifically defined word. If you go try to look this up, like there's as many definitions as there are sociologists and it approximately means any behavior that you do at all that wasn't programmed into you at birth. Fine. So in the context we're talking about, I think it can at least usefully refer to kind of an organization's overall attitude disposition. But more importantly, the pattern habits of behavior. That's the part that I think we're interested in, which is to say, what are my tasks as a member of the organization, whatever organization you're trying to influence? I'm in it. I have an idea of what my tasks are and I have an idea of how I perform them. And those are habits. Those are habitual. I've been doing them for a long time. That's the important part of culture, if you ask me. Those parts are closely related to identity, which is a clue of where we're going to look next. We're going to talk about the task-oriented kinds of culture because I think it's what matters. We're going to ignore attitude and disposition for a couple reasons, which I'm going to skip because we got to move fast.

[8:20](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=500) So why are habits really hard to change? You've probably noticed this in your own life as well as in the work that you're trying to do. And the short answer is, if I have to put this on a bumper sticker, which we almost do, then the reason habits are so hard to change is because thinking about what we do is really hard and expensive and we're almost never doing it. This picture is a guy named Harold Garfinkel, which I'm going to explain why he matters in a second. Here is a thought experiment, which I'm going to have to rush a little bit. Have you ever thought about how it is that you make a decision? Just yourself, but I'll bet you get pretty much the same answer if you're thinking about the organization that you belong to. You're an agent that has free will, we'll assume for purposes of this experiment, and we're assuming that you're making some kind of decision that matters to you at least a little bit. So like tossing a coin is not going to be your decision algorithm. Think for a minute, if you have a piece of paper in front of you, like jot down what you think the steps to that are. You only need like five or 10 words on this. What do you think is what you're doing when you make a decision? I'll take a deep cleansing breath.

[9:44](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=584) Now I'm going to take some guesses. There's, okay, there's 72 people here now. Amazing. I'm going to take some guesses because we don't have time to call and really do a very interactive thing. So I have preloaded some guesses onto the slide. And if the thing that I bring up is anywhere on your list of steps that you would have written down to take a decision, then do a thumbs up or a reaction. So one of those steps is gather information. A few. All right. Yeah, it comes in slowly. 13, 14. I'm pretty good. One of those steps is form your own opinion. I can see the way this works is it's kind of a decaying average. So if I get any reactions, we're going to assume that I'm kind of on the right track. You compare with other opinions that are out there in the world. You look on the internet or something. You evaluate the constraints that you've got. If you're buying a car or something, you probably don't have an infinity budget. So you've got to rule out some of the cars. You anticipate, you try to anticipate the consequences of the various choices you have, which is to say you're trying to forecast the future. And then you make a decision.

[10:55](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=655) The thumbs up was a little bit hard to interpret, but I'm just going to barrel on assuming that you are more or less in agreement that this is how you think you make a decision. This is what my students come up with, more or less, when we do this in class. Here's the thing about that. It is a story you are telling yourself. It is not what you actually do. It is a story that you are telling yourself. And it is not what you actually do. It is not what any people do almost ever. It's been studied extensively. This is where I said we'd go back to, we've mentioned Harold Darfinkel, who has been watching juries make their decisions for decades. An interesting, completely different field was the data science that used to be published by OKCupid in the 2000s, which was a dating site, if you were fortunate enough to not know that. It was a dating site. And they published a lot of data science on the actions that people take and compared those with the descriptions, with the self-descriptions that people give you for why they make their decisions. There's no correlation whatsoever. It's kind of the bumper sticker version of that. Daniel Kahneman came along, he's an economist, I'm going to talk about next, and decided that we're almost never doing this. He came up, he thought about this a lot. He was an economist. Economist theory is famously mostly based on this idea that people are rational choice actors. So we're assuming that everybody making a decision in a giant complex economy is figuring out what's going to be best for them in some kind of rational way using criteria and then making decisions accordingly. And economists are endlessly frustrated. And then the rest of us that are affected by their decisions are endlessly frustrated by the fact that they're very, very bad at predicting what's actually going to happen.

[12:50](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=770) Daniel Kahneman got tired of that. He eventually got a Nobel Prize, which made him perhaps a little bit bolder about challenging the foundations of his field, and published something that is very famous. It's a book called Thinking Fast and Slow. There's a number of papers that he did with various collaborators on it. And his thesis was that our behavior looks like it's as if we have two different brains in our head at the same time. One of them, which he called system one, operates all the time automatically with no effort. It's where emotions happen. It's very quick, and it brings up impressions and preferences without you asking for them. System two is the one that proceeds slowly and has words associated with it and can be explained and written down and written in an email. It's a conscious logical thinking brain. System two is kind of the only one that we think, if you ask people to describe how they make decisions, what they will describe is system two, because that's the only one that we can really verbalize, because that's the part of the brain that is able to examine itself. Whereas what's going on most of the time is system one. So again, we have to blow through this. You hopefully mostly accept this at face value for the purposes of one hour talk. But there's a lot of evidence, and obviously this theory isn't perfect any more than any others, and it's been criticized just like them all, but it's fairly convincing to look around and observe that for any given task you might want, there will be people that tend more to use system one and people that tend more to use system two, but for all of us all the time, system one is making most of the decisions most of the time.

[14:36](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=876) We could do more thought experiments if we had more time, which were along the lines of I asked you to write out a decision-making process, which is what you think you do. Then we could go back and say, what you've made for most of you is probably 2 p.m. I'm in mountain time. It's noon here. But both of us made hundreds of decisions between getting up in the morning and sitting down. Here on this Zoom call right now, hundreds, like, what did we eat? When did we get up? What clothes did we put on? On and on and on and on and on. And it will, I will be pretty surprised if anyone on this Zoom call made any decision at all using that decision making process that we talked about a minute ago, using the System 2 process. All of those things happened automatically. If they didn't, we'd be paralyzed. We'd still be making a list of the pros and cons of wearing a blue shirt versus a black shirt for this meeting. We'd never get anywhere. So almost all decisions are made by System 1 all the time, which I'm caricaturing as autopilot.

[15:37](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=937) There is a whole other field that studies this and came up with extremely similar conclusions, but used extremely different jargon to describe it because that's apparently how academics works. These sociologists, for a long time, have been describing Daniel Kahneman's System 1 as sensemaking. And they have, this is mostly Carl Weick's work, he again has a lot of collaborators, but if anyone's name gets attached to it, it's probably him. And as in this textbook, as in a bunch of other textbooks and published papers, they have a pretty elaborate theory of what the sensemaking process is, what that System 1 automatic process of making sense of your world looks like. And they claim it has these properties, which are that the base motivation is my need to understand my role in the world, what my identity is. It's a retrospective process. It only works on things that have happened in the past that I can see. It is not effective at all working on fantasy worlds, which includes what I imagine the future to be, which is how we spend most of our time, we think, in business.

[16:47](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=1007) It's a process that creates understanding through taking action. It's not static. You can't sit still and contemplate the universe until you've achieved a perfect understanding. It's social. It depends on the people around us. Nobody does it alone. It's ongoing, it's continuous, it's automatic. That's all those System 1 words back again. It's powered by selective observation. So observation is very important, but you're not a passive observer. You're always choosing facts that are the ones that you're going to weave into your story. And that story that you're creating is more about plausibility than it is accuracy. These are the properties of sensemaking, which Daniel Kahneman calls by the name System 1. We mostly use the sensemaking terminology just because there's more behind it that seems relevant to the work that we do. So, if you are with me so far, you believe that most of the behavior that you're seeing from most people around you most of the time is happening out of an automatic sensemaking process. It is not happening because they're stopping and thinking about what they're doing.

[17:53](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=1073) And there are opportunities which are rare for when that process breaks down, for when the automatic sensemaking is interrupted somehow. That's your chance to introduce a change. And that's the event that you might call a crisis. So I'm going to hand off to Weaver to cover this next piece.

**Matthew Weaver**

[18:16](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=1096) Hello, everyone. Can you hear me all right? Thumbs up will do. Great. My name is Weaver, and I'm going to take it from here. This sign is a great universal life prototype. Hazards exist that are not marked. I'm going to talk about the shape of them. Here are some things we might spot when sensemaking fails. So, Wyke, in his work, calls this going from a cosmos, meaning a system where I understand my role and relationship to the world around me. This is like my tasks and why I am doing them as part of an organization, to chaos, where I do not understand how my tasks relate to the world around me. How I relate to the organization around me. Wyke calls this a cosmological episode. Here are some telltales of this in organizations. One of them is Fundamental Surprise. This term comes from military academia. It was first coined by Israelis writing about a particular Hamas attack in the early 1980s that emerged in a form, in a structure, and with resources that Israel's entire defense and intelligence apparatus was unable to predict. They were fundamentally surprised by what happened. In other literature, this is called an outside context problem.

[19:45](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=1185) Think of European settlers arriving in New Zealand, right? Perception breakdown. This is when the organization's idea about what is going on fragments and becomes disassociated, meaning you no longer have a similar idea about facts at any given place inside of the organization. You can see this happening at the scale of civilizations, in fact. We're going through it right now. The degradation or disruption of existential functions. Your organization can no longer do the thing that it is supposed to do. You are a ticket master and you cannot sell tickets. You are veteran affairs. You cannot process claims or adjudicate appeals. You are the Californian EDD and you cannot process unemployment claims. High visibility. Suddenly your organization is on the news every day. It is part of the 24-hour news cycle or the one hourly news cycle. Or your leaders or some particular decision are the only topic for discussion on any internal forum. The entire organization is paying attention to a single thing or a small set of people.

[21:00](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=1260) Or you have encountered rigid or non-negotiable timing, legislative deadlines, or world events where there was a deadline and you were unaware. COVID-19 is one of these. If you spot three to five of these going on where you are sitting right now, you are in a cosmological episode or a crisis. I'll take the next slide, Mikey. We think these are opportunities, as Mikey said, to make directed action inside of an organization that can result in lasting cultural change, which is to say permanent alteration to the way that the organization works. Anytime there is a fundamental surprise, the good news is you are now in the process of discovering reality. Fundamental surprise means the model that you and your organization had for how the world is and how it works was wrong. Now you are finding out what is actually going on. You are discovering facts for the first time in however long it has been.

[22:00](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=1320) Perception breakdown is fantastic. If your idea about what is happening has broken up and everybody has a different idea about what the facts are, you now have an opportunity to create a new consensus reality, a new sense making together. You cannot do that until the one you have breaks. If you have broken existential functions, change is no longer optional. Everybody's quarterly or five-year strategic plan is now meaningless because the main thing that the organization is supposed to do is not happening. That means that you get to make new changes. High visibility means that there is performance pressure in environments where maybe there was not before. It's a radically new set of incentives in a lot of cases, and all decisions clearly have stakes. For instance, if the organization is in the news every day or regularly under some kind of investigative body, think auditing, legislative committee, IG, take your pick, all of a sudden decisions have a different set of stakes than they did before.

[23:05](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=1385) Rigid or non-negotiable timing means your decision-making timelines are compressed, so things that used to take nine months for the organization to decide can now be decided in an hour or a day. Things that used to take a day can be decided in minutes. That's all great. It means you can actually get something done. This makes for opportunity because incentives are now radically different. Power structures are inverted or disrupted. It suddenly is possible for people anywhere in the organization to put new information in front of leadership in a lot of cases. Different people get listened to. The organization has radically altered priorities. Everything is shuffled. And there are disrupted communications patterns. Those are all opportunities to put new facts in front of new groups of people, which will establish a new sense of what is happening and how we relate to it. The sense of identity, what are my tasks, and how do I do them is weakened or erased. That's the chaos thing that we talked about.

[24:06](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=1446) This is the one and only time a new set of identities can be created for people in the organization, a new set of ideas about what their tasks are and how they do them. It is impossible to do that outside of these opportunities or slow enough that impossible is a rounding error. Slide. How to make the most of it. The key is to understand what is now happening is group sensemaking. It is going to happen with or without you. It will not wait for the new slide deck or the new strategic plan. It will not wait for you to decide how you're going to make decisions. It will not wait for any of these things. It is already going on. It is a natural, automatic, and social process that every primate is engaging in all the time. The clues we have about how sensemaking works from the research are what we use to help pick the things we are going to do to direct the new outcome. Crisis means new stuff is going to happen. We're suggesting that you have some influence in those moments to choose what the new things are. Here are some of the tactics we use and suggest others use. We have discovered these through an empirical tradition. The four of us together have intervened in hundreds of crisis situations over decades. We have kept what's worked and discarded the rest.

[25:27](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=1527) One of the most important things is to create a venue for new group sensemaking. You'll hear these called war rooms or incident command centers. Adapt to local jargon. I didn't meet too many people in the Pentagon who were lazy about their war metaphors. You want to put all of the confused people and fragments of information you have into one physical place because sensemaking is social, ongoing, continuous, and automatic. You are constructing the new reality by picking who is in a room and what facts are in that room. You want things like screens on the walls that you can put facts onto when they are discovered. You want it to be easy to reach so that new facts can be introduced by people who come there and say things. You want to have an operational cadence inside of these rooms. You need it to be slightly faster than is needed by the situation. It needs to be at least daily, we think. Twice daily also seems to work if your time zone of participation is wide enough. You need very tight escalation paths to leadership so that nobody can get stuck on wondering whether there's permission to take action. All of this signals non-regular order to the rest of the organization. That is part of how you increase the speed and funnel new facts into the body you've created inside of this room.

[26:51](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=1611) The reason that you want to do this is that you are going to sensemake by action. As Mikey said earlier, new realities are created by taking action, observing the results. You cannot sit around until you decide you know everything and then do the right thing. That is just a myth. It's not how anything works in life. You want to have a hypothesis at all times. That's a direction for the experiment. One of our favorite is pick part of the system and turn it off. You will discover a whole bunch of facts if you set out to do that. One of them is what parts of the system that is connected to. Another one is who actually has the capability to turn something off. That is a person who is going to know facts. You want to untrain the expectation of waterfall decision-making. The thing where I'm going to suggest something that is then reviewed by another layer of people who is reviewed by another layer of people who is reviewed by another layer of people until all of the correct facts are assembled and a decision is made. That is poison in the best of times. In a crisis or a cosmological episode, it will prevent action.

[27:51](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=1671) Action is the only thing that will allow new facts to be discovered and progress to be made in constructing a reality. It actually doesn't matter how right you are with any given hypothesis. What matters is that it is plausible. Plausibility is better than accuracy every time. You want to create observability. Look backwards. Sense-making is retrospective. It is backwards-looking. Look backwards to seek understanding of what just happened. The more backwards-looking information you can feed into these rooms, the faster you are going to create a new cosmos, which is to say a new understanding of what is happening, a new consensus reality where people feel like they understand what their tasks are and how they relate to them. The organization and the system around them. You want to encourage and reward role fluidity. This means you want to encourage people understanding that any part of this problem is now their job. Their old identity, the old things that they thought that they did and why they did them are no longer relevant.

[28:59](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=1739) You want to actively disrupt that. Most people's strongest instinct is that they would like to be useful. That is the favorite way to relate to the organization and the system around them. Their old role may not be useful anymore. In fact, the odds are that it is not. And so you can ignore that at your peril. If you reward it, you are going to get forward motion, you're getting more actions, and reality will get constructed. If you ignore it, what you have is a bunch of uncomfortable and panicked people looking for something to do. It will not be helpful. Their actions are driven by their need to understand their identity, how they relate to the organization and the system around them. You are constructing a new cosmos. And it will end when that happens. It happens sooner than you think, and it happens whether you intervene or not. We believe all of this stuff, and have observed, all of this stuff happens whether you intervene and take new actions.

[30:01](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=1801) You are going to get a new cosmos, a new sense of reality, and a new sense of identity for everybody who is participating in the organization. If you have injected new roles, new tasks, new patterns of communications, these are the new habits. This is now what everybody is doing on autopilot. It is what is real. And in fact, before you know it, a month or two will have gone by and everyone will have forgotten that anything else ever existed. You have changed the habits, and therefore you have changed what everybody is calling culture. This is how it works. This is what happens, whether you are intervening or not. So, retrospectively, looking back over this, we have, what is crisis engineering? We think it is the act of intervening in these circumstances where sensemaking and consensus reality have broken down under pressure. This is true in lots of places at lots of times, and there are sufficient circumstances in order to do something new.

[31:05](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=1865) To have a new non-regular order moment, pick a new set of actions, a new set of facts, and construct a new reality. Culture is just habit. It is what people do when they are on autopilot, which is all the time. Almost all the time, everyone in an organization is running on autopilot. They are doing the thing that costs them the least amount of thinking. When the autopilot is off or no longer successful for proceeding through a set of problems, that is a crisis. Those are the times when you are able to make rapid, directed, and durable change at a rate that is hundreds or thousands of times faster than any other time. We worked all this out backwards. So, what we all did collectively in our careers and, frankly, as a young company, was get very good at crisis tactics. We found a set of things that worked more often than not, and we just did them because they worked all over the place, and we tried to take that show wherever we could get into a problem.

[32:10](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=1930) And we noticed that those things worked because they caused organizations to emerge from crisis. They restarted the existential functions. They reconstructed consensus reality, right? And in practice, that's things like unemployment claims got processed. Healthcare.gov started to work. VA appeals actually got adjudicated. Then we noticed that the breakdown in sensemaking is what defines the crisis. So, we sat down to try and figure out what circumstances caused us to be able to use these tactics and be successful, and we identified what those were. And then, looking at academic research, we realized that that is the breakdown in sensemaking, or at least that's what the sociologists have been calling it for decades. Then we noticed that the existence of a comfortable cosmos, a sense of identity, a relationship between individuals and the system and the organization that they are part of, is what makes the organization relatively impervious to change at all other times.

[33:10](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=1990) So, we came at this backwards, which I have to say that personally is an uncanny experience to have a whole bunch of stuff that I felt like I had a great instinctual understanding of, and then discover that there is like 40 to 50 years of organizational research where people figured all this out from first principles in an empirical tradition that looked nothing like the one I had lived through.

**Mikey Dickerson**

[33:33](https://youtu.be/55RL48d1Y0g?t=2013) You can always reach out to all of us. We do read our email at team at layerolive.com. And I believe now we have 19 minutes or so for questions.

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Original page: https://innovate-us.org/crisis-engineering-for-public-officials · Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), as stated on innovate-us.org