Crisis Engineering for Public Systems: Designing Resilience Under Pressure

Crises are not exceptions, they are a recurring challenge in how complex systems operate. Public professionals are increasingly expected to respond quickly to breakdowns, disruptions, and failures while navigating complexity, uncertainty, and high stakes.

Join Marina Nitze, Matthew Weaver, and Mikey Dickerson, founders of Layer Aleph and co-authors of Crisis Engineering: Time-Tested Tools for Turning Chaos into Clarity, for a conversation with Beth SImone Noveck on how governments can design systems that hold up under pressure. Grounded in the Layer Aleph team’s experience, this session introduces a systems-based approach to crisis engineering: treating resilience not as an individual leadership trait, but as a design challenge.

Participants will explore how crises unfold across a lifecycle, why organizations often miss early warning signs, and how to intervene in real time to stabilize and redesign systems under stress. Combining structured presentation with discussion, the workshop will examine how moments of disruption can become opportunities to improve services, strengthen operations, and build public systems that adapt rather than fail.