Who am I?

• kyle.marek-spartz.org
• he/him/they/them
• Not speaking on behalf of my employer today, but as an individual
• Undergraduate in Linguistics at UMN

Questions we’ll answer

1. What are Communities of Practice and Landscapes of Practice?
2. Which Communities of Practice came before us? What can we learn from them?
3. Which Communities of Practice might exist in your organization?
4. How can we build connections between Communities of Practice?
5. Which Communities of Practice are connecting organizations today?

What is a Community of Practice?

Community by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0

What is a Community of Practice?

• All learning is “situated” in context (Lave & Wenger, 1991):
  • Social: our communities
  • Domain: the topic at hand
  • Actions: our practices
• A Community of Practice is (Wenger, 1998):
  • a group working together
  • to advance their understanding of a topic
  • by putting ideas into practice
• We form an informal one today here in this room

What is a Landscape of Practice?

What is a Landscape of Practice?

• As communities form, grow, and decay:
• People connect multiple communities together
• Communities leave artifacts across the landscape
• The sum of the communities and artifacts is a domain’s Body of Knowledge

Which Communities came before us?

Which Communities came before us?

What can we learn from them?

• Contributions about Resilience come from many domains
• Without a breadth of perspective, we limit potential insights
• These are some of the domains I’ve encountered on my journey
  • Beyond Software Engineering
• I am not an expert in any one of these domains

Reliability Engineering

Safety Pin by Haragayato, CC BY-SA 3.0

Reliability Engineering

Lean Manufacturing

1. Industrialization, Manufacturing, and Scaling up
   1. Adam Smith, Division of labor, and the pin
   2. Taylorism and measurement
   3. Deming - “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth”
   4. The Toyota Way – “We are modifying and improving our looms every day”
   5. Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, The Goal

Reliability Engineering

Lean Manufacturing

(Image from All About Lean blog post by Christopher Roser)

(Site) Reliability Engineering

1. Site Operations: a term before (web)sites were a thing
2. Google relearned these principles in a different context, adapted the terminology and techniques and declared Site Reliability Engineering as something new
3. DevOps literature (Phoenix Project) more explicitly acknowledges these predecessors

Systems Engineering

• Not much to do with Operating Systems…
• 
• Two quotes from Donella Meadows:
• “The world, or at least the parts of it humans think they understand, is organized in subsystems aggregated into larger subsystems, aggregated into still larger subsystems.”
• “Loss of resilience can come as a surprise, because the system usually is paying more attention to its play than its playing space.”
• A documented Body of Knowledge exists for this domain as a Wiki

Human factors

• See also: Human computer interaction

1. You can’t separate the humans from the system
2. The assumptions of designers and behavior of operators within the system are intrinsically part of the system

• “Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.” – Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook (Emphasis mine)
• Hence: Sociotechnical Systems

Human factors

• See also: Ironies of Automation (Bainbridge, 1983)
• See also: Control Theory

Organizational Learning

flowchart LR
      GoverningVariables[Governing Variables] --> Actions --> Consequences --> Match((Match))
      Consequences --> Mismatch((Mismatch)) -- Single-loop --> Actions
      Mismatch -- Double-loop --> GoverningVariables

• “If the thermostat asked itself questions such as why it was set at 68 degrees, or why it was programmed the way it was, then it would be a double loop learner.” – Chris Argyris

Incident Management

• In 1968, firefighters in the Western US responded to a Mismatch by aligning Governing Variables between fire departments
• Led to Incident Command System
• Adapted beyond fire incidents to other hazards, and even planned events
• Established as national standard
• This standard has been further adapted for industry use to varying degrees

Health Care

• Efforts to reduce accidents were inconsistently successful
• What if instead we encourage successes?
• Lead to the idea of Safety I and Safety II:
  • Safety I: ensure “as few things as possible go wrong”
  • Safety II: ensure “as many things as possible go right”
• A summary: Hollnagel, Wears, Braithwaite, 2015

How Complex Systems Fail

how.complexsystems.fail

• Succinct summary of principles of Resilience Engineering
• Reading it may cause a mismatch, an opportunity to change governing variables:
  • Post-accident attribution to a ‘root cause’ is fundamentally wrong.
• Does not mention the word resilience

Resilience Engineering, a working definition

• The practice of extending the capacity of a system to respond to unforeseen changes

• Practice: putting theory into action

• Extending: the capacity is already there, we should encourage it

• Capacity: not necessarily actively utilized

• System: humans are included

• Unforeseen: a Mismatch

Some paradoxes

• Robust systems aren’t necessarily Resilient
• Configurable systems aren’t necessarily Resilient
• Automated systems aren’t necessarily Resilient
• But these things can help

Which Communities of Practice might exist in your organization?

• Site Reliability Engineering
• Front-end Engineering
• Customer Support
• Finance and Accounting
• Human Resources
• …
• Once you start looking for Resilience, people everywhere are engineering it
• They just might not be using the same terms
• Unforeseen events may affect and require coordination of all these communities

How can we build connections between Communities of Practice?

(Figure from Han, 2009)

How can we build connections between Communities of Practice?

• Harvard Business Review article, 2010 – Harnessing Your Staff’s Informal Networks
• Structural Holes, Ron Burt (1995):
  • Individuals connecting communities further apart in the social graph are essential to the flow of information between those groups
  • Information Brokers
• Weak Ties, Granovetter (1973):
  • Weak connections in the social graph are critical to the diffusion of information, especially between groups
  • Yes, people were doing social network analysis in 1973!

How can we build connections between Communities of Practice?

(Figure from Han, 2009)

Which Communities of Practice are connecting organizations today?

Which Communities of Practice are connecting organizations today?

Within the University

1. Code Freeze ’23
2. MN Resilience Program (COVID-19 response)
3. Stress and Resilience Research Lab
4. Spirituality and Resilience
5. Institute of Child Development - Resilience
6. Building Resilient Agricultural Communities
7. Minnesota Sea Grant Community Resilience Program
8. …

Which Communities of Practice are connecting organizations today?

Local Government

• Both Minneapolis and Saint Paul have Chief Resilience Officers
• Minneapolis is developing a Resilience Hub
• Minneapolis is a member of the Resilient Cities Network

Which Communities of Practice are connecting organizations today?

Resilience Engineering Groups

1. Association:
   1. Resilience Engineering Association
2. Conferences:
   1. REA Symposium
   2. Learning From Incidents
3. Summaries of research:
   1. Resilience Roundup
   2. Resilience Engineering Institute
   3. Resilience Papers Club

Which Communities of Practice are connecting organizations today?

Resilience Coffee

A twice monthly virtual meetup discussing topics related to resilience engineering

Where are we going?

1. “We all do better when we all do better” – Paul Wellstone
2. Documenting the Body of Knowledge of Resilience Engineering
   1. Concept structured rather than content structured
3. Triple threat:
   1. Pandemic
   2. Climate Change
   3. Systemic Racism

Where are we going?

3. Mutual Aid between Communities of Practice (Spade, 2020)
   1. 

      Cover of Mutual Aid by Dean Spade

Thank you!

kyle.marek-spartz.org

resilience-coffee.org

image

z.umn.edu/4questionsurvey