Crisis engineering: how to lead when the system breaks

Every government leader eventually faces the moment when a critical system fails. The platform goes down, the backlog explodes, the headlines turn ugly, and the pressure to get back to normal as fast as possible becomes overwhelming.

But normal is usually what created the problem. And a system in crisis is the one system that will finally let you change it.

In this Mission O/S Live, Rise8's Founder & CEO Bryon Kroger and VP of Enablement Adam Furtado sit down with Marina Nitze—co-author of Crisis Engineering and Hack Your Bureaucracy—to talk about what it really takes to lead when a system is failing, and how to turn a program's worst moment into the opening for the change it actually needs.

Marina has spent her career inside large public systems under pressure, having served as Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Senior Advisor on technology at the White House. Her argument runs against the grain: the usual playbooks of careful planning, expert consultation, and bold strategy are exactly what stop working under pressure. Crisis isn't the end of the plan. It's the rare window when a broken system will finally let you fix it.

They'll cover:

• The five signals that tell you you're actually in a crisis—and how to read them as leverage instead of alarm
• Why the leadership instincts that got you promoted fail under real pressure, and what to do instead
• How to use a crisis to make the structural changes that were impossible to get approved when things were "fine"
• What it takes to stand up a crisis response inside government constraints — procurement, rotation, and all—without waiting for permission
  

If you're leading a government program and you're tired of surviving the fire drills instead of harnessing them, this conversation is for you.