Sticking Together while Staying Apart: Resilience in the time of global pandemic

A presentation at Austin DevOps - September Virtual Meetup in in Austin, TX, USA by fen aldrich

Everything is a little bit broken all of the time. Sometimes, like recently, as in right now, the core truths and assumptions about the universe seem to be shifted out from underneath us without warning. And yet, Netflix streams movies, GitHub serves code, we all keep going and working from home and surviving. These systems, both technical and social, are resilient. And through their resilience they are able to handle all those one-in-a-million occurrences that crop up nine-times-in-ten. But what does it mean to be resilient? And further, how can we recognize and grow this resilience to better deal with the systemic surprises we’re dealing with right now and in the future? What does a resilient team look like, and how do you foster that?

This talk will answer:

  • What is Resilience?
  • How can we create resilience in ourselves, teams and systems?
  • How do our networks of systems (people, teams, organizations, applications) create resilience for each other?
  • What happens when major systems and networks fail?
  • How can we discover and foster resilience in our people, teams and systems?

Resources

The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.