David Woods, The Ohio State University
SRE is one proving ground on resilient performance in action (also known as SNAFU Catching). It is a critical contributor to the scientific foundations for Resilience Engineering.
A new round of growth & change is producing new complexity penalties—complexification. How will/can SRE cope as the lines of tension change? The skills & expertise to do SRE well are verb-centric—“resilience—as adaptive capacity—is a verb in the future tense.” The human push for advantage from technology change is noun-centric.
SRE is one arena where the two framings conflict given the expanding the layers and tangles of interdependencies. SRE can adapt by innovating new verb-based means to see ahead in order to anticipate, to see around in order to synchronize, and to see anew to reframe models.
David is a pioneer of Resilience Engineering that looks at how people adapt to cope with complexity in dynamic risky human-cyber systems including accident investigations in critical digital services, critical care medicine, aviation, energy, disaster response, military operations, & space operations (advisor to the Columbia Space Shuttle Accident Investigation Board).
He has discovered the key ingredients that allow systems to build the potential for resilient performance and flourish despite complexity penalties that accompany growth (https://resiliencefoundations.github.io/video-1-introduction-pt-1-it's-all-about-viability.html). His books include Behind Human Error, Resilience Engineering (the 1st book in the field), Resilience Engineering in Practice, and Joint Cognitive Systems. He started the SNAFU Catchers Consortium, a software industry-university partnership, in 2015 to apply the new science to build resilience in critical digital services (see stella.report).
He is Past-President of the Resilience Engineering Association and Past-President of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
author = {David Woods},
title = {{SRE} \& Complexification: Where Verbs and Nouns Do Battle},
year = {2025},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}