Why We Still Suck At Resilience: Organizational Dynamics
Your organization has invested heavily in resilience. You've implemented chaos engineering, incident analysis, GameDays, load testing, and operational readiness reviews. You've followed the frameworks, hired experts, and built the programs. Everything looks good on paper.
Yet when production fails in ways that matter, you discover that all that investment hasn't built the adaptive capacity you expected. The same types of incidents keep recurring. Teams struggle with novel failures despite months of practice. The gap between impressive-sounding programs and actual resilience persists.
If this sounds familiar, this book is for you.
This book focuses on organizational and cultural dynamics of resilience work. It examines why your technically excellent practices aren't building the capability you need.
This book examines the organizational dynamics that systematically transform learning mechanisms into compliance theater. Through more than a decade of consulting work across hundreds of organizations, I have noticed that resilience practices fail not because they're poorly implemented, but because organizational forces, efficiency pressure, performance demands, control orientation, short-term focus, heroism culture, systematically undermine the conditions that enable learning.
At the heart of every system failure is a gap between Work-as-Imagined (how we think systems work) and Work-as-Done (how they actually work). This gap is inevitable in complex systems. Resilience comes from building organizational capacity to discover and navigate this gap through continuous learning. Most organizations instead try to eliminate the gap through controls and documentation, drifting into brittleness while feeling increasingly safe.
What you'll learn from this book:
- Why the gap between Work-as-Imagined and Work-as-Done is where fragility hides, and why learning capacity matters more than perfect planning
- The five organizational tensions that systematically undermine resilience practices, and how to navigate them consciously rather than drift unconsciously
- What determines whether practices function as genuine learning mechanisms or become expensive theater
- How to make organizational drift visible before it degrades adaptive capacity
- Why psychological safety, appropriate incentives, and leadership support are prerequisites for any practice to build capability
The approach is philosophical rather than prescriptive. This book doesn't offer a five-step plan to fix resilience. It offers frameworks for understanding what's actually happening in your organization, vocabulary for discussing dynamics that usually stay invisible, and principles for navigating irreducible tensions that cannot be eliminated.
Who this book is for:
- Engineering leaders and SREs who know their resilience practices aren't working but can't articulate why
- Teams doing all the right things yet still experiencing repeated incidents
- Anyone frustrated that significant investment hasn't built the adaptive capacity they need
- Leaders who need to explain to their organization why resilience work keeps failing despite genuine effort
What makes this book different:
This book combines academic resilience engineering research (Hollnagel, Woods, Dekker, Edmondson, and more) with practical consulting experience, examining not just how practices should work in theory, but why they fail in practice. It's grounded in operational reality while being intellectually rigorous. It's honest about complexity rather than offering simple solutions that don't work.
If you're looking for a checklist to follow, this isn't your book. If you want to understand why your resilience work keeps failing and how to navigate the organizational dynamics that undermine it, keep reading.
