PAPod 505 - Unlocking Resilience Engineering: A Conversation with Asher Balkin

I think it has to be that way because you need to understand, you can't provide the breadth and the detail. If you don't understand the breadth and the detail, right? You can't help people sort out what's important about these ideas or what's new or this stuff is really on the fringe of, you can't really do that unless you have the technical background. Hey everybody, pre-accident investigation podcast, I'm Todd Conklin, the host of this incredible story. And you are in luck today, baby. You are totally, today's going to be the best day ever. So we just did a long discussion, protected discussion, but a really interesting discussion. And now I want to actually expand that discussion in a new direction. Today, we're going to talk to Asher Balkan, who is in the cognitive systems engineering lab at the Ohio State University with Mike and David Woods, Richard Cook was from there, God rest his soul. Asher is incredible. And if you don't know him, well, today's a big day because he's brilliant. I mean, he's just, there's no question he's brilliant. What's fun about this is that he's also completely available. I mean, you just talk to him like normal human being, you can like talk about anything. You don't even need to talk about fancy pants, resilience, engineering stuff. You can just talk about normal junk. That's how rounded he is as a person. Plus he's fun. So it's a great conversation. How are you? How are things going? Good I hope it's crazy right now, holy cow. What is going on in the world? Every day there's some new incredible bizarre freaky thing that I never thought would happen happening. I mean, just accidents and politics and coups and just all sorts of stuff, it's just it's kind of nuts. I'll just say it, it's nuts. But the good part is it's summer. Summer kind of makes everything go better because you never are that far away, at least in North America for you guys that are other places. You're never that far away from potato salad and potato salad is a really, really effective weighty potatoes. I mean, it's kind of like a whole new genre of potato eating in the potato salad. And you can have like mayonnaise base, you can have German, mustard, there's a top vinegar base. There's a ton of different potato salads. All of them fall into the taste delicious category, which is one of my favorite categories. If you press me on that and so that's a good thing for me, I'm doing more than I want to be doing and I'm not getting enough writing of the bicycle. But I'm looking forward to September when we have the conference in Santa Fe. If you haven't signed up for it, you probably should be thinking about it. It's definitely, they tell me filling up. I haven't really looked because I don't have to look at that stuff. But I do know there's going to be a lot of bike riding because I just did a little project here in Santa Fe and I was able to ride my bike in and out of the job, which just changes everything. And so I'm getting good bike riding in. I mean, it's happening. So that's a plus. So I've got nothing but good to say about that part of the gig. That's for sure. So let's jump into this conversation with Asher. I think you're really going to like it. It's an interesting conversation because I'm so curious why I'll just be honest with you and just say this up front. It's difficult to find information from the School of Resilience Engineering at the Ohio State University. And I don't understand why. So you're going to hear me sort of start with that and that is an important question to ask. We're in the lobby of a big hotel because we were at the CHOL meeting, which was great. Thank you, everyone who did their part on that. Man, that meeting is so much fun. It was hot. It was really hot in Vegas. It was crazy hot. But you get to see all these people. It's kind of like a reunion sort of. And I said down with Asher in this hotel lobby, we maybe should have found a better place. But I think it's going to work out fine. So I think you'll enjoy it. Listen carefully, this conversation, and see what you think. This is Asher and myself having a little chat about resilience engineering and the availability of what they know and what they're learning to those of us who really want this information. So my name is Asher Balkan, I'm a research engineer in the Cognitive Systems Engineering Laboratory at Ohio State University. And I am fascinated by the way that systems react and change and survive in conditions that are so inhospitable. And I think we often overlook that. That somehow we look around and we see all of these things we've built and we think, oh, you know, we're good at this now. We don't realize how inhospitable the world is to our plans to being successful, right? Are you guys frustrated with the amount of uptake your message is getting or not getting? I mean, definitely, do you find that frustrating because from the outside looking in, I will tell you, it's frustrating to me because the work you guys do is crazy good. And I'm not even trying to butter you up, it's among the best in the world. It's really kind of, in many ways, the only voice in the world that's having some of these conversations. Yeah. I mean, there's no doubt that Dave Woods, Eric Hallmägel, Richard Cook, Mike Raoud, that these folks are true luminaries. Yeah. Like, at this point, I'm convinced that's beyond question. I think what concerns me the most is the one slide deep phenomenon where people understand just enough to be dangerous, right? They don't really understand and we haven't found a way to make it clear to them. So they get this kind of very, they get the varnish on it, the very surface level stuff and then they think, okay, I get this and I'm going to go and try to do this. And that, that part concerns me. But if I say this, I mean this is the most loving way I can say that, I'm not sure you can blame the reader. No, and I think that's, I think that's absolutely fair. And that's something that as a resilience community, we're really trying to figure that out right now, right? How do we, how do we make this message accessible, right? We're, we've been really good at coming up with interesting, new, useful, good ideas. We haven't been good at communicating those wide. Is part of that reason that's the case is kind of that if you build it, they will come theory? Is it, do you guys think, and I mean this again in a positive way, but do you think if we have good enough ideas, they'll find their way into the community? I, that's, I think that's part of it. I think the other part of it is that there was, there, there was and I think still is this belief that if we can build this thing out, if we somehow, if we add enough and make it complete enough, it will be clear. And I, I don't know that that's, that that's really holding true. I think the, the better thing for us to do is say, look, here's the state of the science right now. We don't know everything, we haven't worked out all the details, but this is our best, this is our best set of how this works and start explaining it to people. And, and you know, the places where we have gotten traction, you know, our places that have tangible frequent experiences with failure, like, you know, that, that HRO would have suggested on these kinds of things, but there are also places that tend to have embedded science folks, places like NASA, places like airlines, places like Air Force Research Lab, places like hospitals. People who are more comfortable engaging with the direct science as opposed to folks who are, you know, doing more, more direct problem solving. So that's interesting because the follow up question I want to ask, which probably will sound a little offensive is, is so, that exclusive access to people of science, is that helping you defuse your information to where it needs to go? Yeah, I don't know, I don't know that it is. The belief implicit or not, the belief was that if we can get this out into enough disciplines then it will kind of move through on its own. And I think we've had a lot more resistance than we ever expected that was going to happen. Is it resistance though? I mean, that's a interesting choice. So I think there's two things, right? So I think, I think, first of all, I think we have continually underestimated the difficulty with overcoming the narrative of simplicity, right, that we can simplify this, that we can break it down into its constituent parts and we underestimated the staying power of that. But I also don't think we have, you know, the equivalent science journalism. I don't think we have really cracked the code yet on how to make this accessible to find the target audience and recognize those target audiences probably don't have a science or a direct technical background. They're not, they're interested in the results of the research. They're not interested in the details of the research methodology and talking about that doesn't advance their cause. One of the things that I think becomes important in this conversation is if you need people to translate your ideas, then you have to probably stop beating up the people who do the translations. And I mean that in a loving way, but I mean, if you're counting on other people to translate your ideas to the great masses, then you have to have a certain amount of faith in the people that you count on to translate. And there's a little bit of a leadism here, I mean, you know what I mean, it's common. I think there's a leadism in physics, there's a lead, I mean, that's not unexpected. You might be right, but I want to, like I would look at it as, I would almost say it's a reaction to frustration on the part of, excuse me, on the part of our community and a lot of the research community, which is, I have this great idea, I can't explain it to you. I can't get you to get it. I want you to just get it. Exactly. And I don't know that it's necessarily kind of like an intellectual leadism as much as a response to this kind of frustration that, please let me help you, why won't you let me help you? You know what I mean? But the scientists that are most successful in mass, and quite honestly, I can't actually I haven't really thought of this before, but so I'm thinking Richard Feynman, okay. He was also incredibly successful as a physicist, he was very popular and a successful physicist. I think his ability was not only as a good theorist, not only as an amazing researcher, but he was also really effective at talking about his ideas. And I think the challenge is, is that the missing component, at least in resilience engineering, and I mean this lovingly, this is not a criticism by far, it's not the absence of ideas, and it's not the absence of super interesting research discoveries. I mean, you guys have tons of super interesting ideas, and you've learned tons of interesting things. Yeah. What's missing is the Feynman third, which is the ability to take that information and make it attainable by the people who most need to hear the information. And I loved hearing you say that organizations that have strong history of failure, you didn't say it that way, but organizations that understand and have lots of exposure to failure, if they're tangible. Right. And that community is way larger than we think it is. Absolutely. Way larger. Right. Absolutely. And yeah, I agree. And I think we are trying now, right? So for a long time, the model in this was, well, if you want to understand resilience engineering, come and get a master's degree, come and get a PhD. And we've known for a long time that that wasn't the way. People can't leave their jobs, leave their families and come and do that. So I think we're starting to devise new methods to do it. So for example, we're doing now, you know, like a week long onsite short course in introduction to cognitive systems and resilience engineering. And that has been incredibly successful because we can get organizations to say, you know what? I can take my teams offline for a week. I can take them and bring you guys out, and we can talk about, you know, how do we think about these things? How do we think about failure? What does it mean to be a brittle system, right? How do we create this kind of graceful sensibility? We can do that. I can't send you away for three years to go get a master's degree or a kid to get a career with it. So I think we are just starting that. But I think it's fair to say that we missed some opportunities along the way. Yeah, but I think I think instead of looking backwards, which is not terribly effective, the challenge I'd give you is what are you thinking about doing differently at moving forward? I mean, because the ideas are too immense and quite honestly, too important right now. I mean, we live in a world that's just gone through a global phenomenon, a global lesson and uncertainty. It's probably the best way I could think the phrase is, a lot of people had their belief that the world was stable, and if we just do this the one right way, it'll be perfect, kind of shocked. I mean, that was sort of ripped out from beneath them, like a carpet on a slick marble floor, speaking of the room we're in right now. That's changed, and so therefore that opportunity, and I do think the one advice I would give all of us, all of us, everyone listening, is that we have to be strategically opportunistic. That when the opportunity comes, we should take it. So therefore we need to seek where those opportunities are and be ready. Absolutely. I think you're right. We have had this global challenge of that. Yeah. There was a disruption, and we have not only do we have, was it a great research experience, but it was also an opportunity to demonstrate that a lot of these phenomena that previously seemed, even though they weren't, they seemed more confined to hospitals or these kind of very specific high-risk, high-variability industries, but we all had to suffer through it, right? It was a non-optional part of existence on Earth, and so we do have a good opportunity now, and I think we do have a new generation of folks coming up in resilience, engineering now. We're starting to say, yeah, we have to target these folks. We have to get these ideas. We have to diffuse this. We have to help people. Our best way to do this is to take the theory that we already have, to take the research we've already done, and share these insights out. So to do that, you're going to have to probably come down a little from the ivory tower, right? I mean, in the most loving way, you can say that, which is, you know, the biggest smack you can give an academic impact. But, I mean, so what I would say is that the ivory tower academies have their place, right? We do need these protected places where we can do this kind of, this kind of research. So I don't know that it's, that, you know, we'll start, we'll come back to where we started, which is, it's about having a foot in both camps, right? It's about recognizing, okay, this is how we present this here, and that's different. These are different things that are important to the research community than is important to the practitioner community, and, and that has long been, I mean, from the beginnings of the sort of new view movement, this idea that you can't, you can't do safety research, you can't do systems research from your office. That's baked in there. You have to get out and, and get into the field. So we're, we're comfortable with that, we just haven't cracked the code on how to make it accessible yet, and I think we're, we're just getting started there. I think that's, that's the, so that's a really good point, actually, yeah, that's actually a really good point, and quite encouraging, yeah, because this isn't a problem of the ivory tower is where the data is coming from, you guys are really quite good at looking where the action is. Right. Yeah, so you're right. That's, actually, that's a really encouraging thing you just said, because that's not the problem you're solving. The problem you're solving is how can we take this information and diffuse it in a way that it's most effective to the people who need it the most? Absolutely. And one of the challenges we're having there is helping people, we're, we're still trying to find a way to help people see these patterns in their work, right? So we can abstract it away and we can say, in general, this is how all of these things work. Every, every thought about, if we thought much about where you're starting these conversations, because I'll give you a piece of advice from the sort of communication scholar side of the house. And that is, you have to meet the group where they are, not where you want them to be. And so part of the challenge that we have, and it's, this is really probably true for you guys, is that you started a quite advanced level in your discussions. And I think sometimes you're starting well ahead of where the group that you want to communicate is actually existing. Yeah. I mean, so I think that that has traditionally been true. I'm not sure that's true now as it has been in the past. I think, for a community example of words, not true, and that is a hundred percent selfish question because I want to, I want to go and look. Yeah. So, so I think we could point to some of these kinds of short course options that we're doing in some of these kinds of, you know, OSU, a shameless plug for OSU. Oh, no, plug away. The cognizance engineering lab, we have, we have, in the past, run these kinds of consortiums of companies that come together and try to solve problems. We've done them in tech. We're now just in the process of starting one up in proactive safety. And when we start there, we don't expect people to have that kind of background. So we come in and we say, okay, we're going to start with kind of basic principles, basic foundational ideas of what does it mean to be adaptive, right? If you don't even know, you've never heard that language before. Let's come up with a work of definition, right? Why does it matter? Why does it even matter that we talk about this as a complex system, right? And we've been successful there, taking folks, you know, we did, we've done, here's it. Here's at the great concrete example. We have learned over the past several years how to take folks who maybe barely got out of high school and are working in, you know, typically blue collar jobs in construction, in tree care, these kinds of folks. And work with them slowly to the point that after a year or 18 months, they're talking about, well, you know, we're running out of adaptive capacity, right? So we are seeing language and idea changes in the organizations where we are directly embedded, right? Which is, I mean, that's exactly the feedback that's helping you understand. So then the question I would ask is, so what have you done differently in those industries that has made it more effective? And I think where we're kind of sort of circling around it, which is we started, we started much lower, we started more foundationally in terms of the ideas. We didn't assume a base of knowledge, we were changing the audience, right? We recognized the audience was changing to your point, recognized the audience was changing and now we're saying, okay, we're not dealing with folks who have 20 years of experience in air traffic control or 20 years of experience running a nuclear reactor on a naval vessel. Now let's start at the very beginning, tell me about your work, all right? This is with this pattern looks like for you, right? Where else do you see this pattern? And once you teach people to start recognizing these patterns, they will see them. And we have, but now we can start to work together. So you've kind of answered the big question. So I guess the follow up is, so how can we not do more of this? And I would add one other thing, just as a cautionary tale, I think it's a cool idea to have these weak long sort of attainable workshops, but that can't be the only modality. I mean, there has to be multiple modalities for people who don't even have the luxury of a weak long workshop or to an extent are kind of scared to go to a weak long workshop. It could be scary. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, especially if you come from an industry or you don't have an educational background, it can be intimidating to ask to show up and stand in front of some of the pioneers of this stuff and sit there for a week and be, you know, work through this stuff. So we are still in the process of cracking that. I think we are getting better, but we do it a long way to go. I think, you know, doing things like podcasts, doing things like short video segments, as you mentioned, those are ways forward, but it's a, I mean, the resiliency committee is still pretty small. Yeah. But, I mean, I wouldn't, that's probably more good than bad, right? I mean, it is, but it's also, it's also limiting how much we can, how fast we can. Yeah. Well, and I think a question that bears to be asked is, you know, what do you guys want from this? I mean, do you want, do you want to help your constituent community get better or do you want to forward the research or both? I mean, I don't know if it's column A or column B or both. I don't think it can be column A or column B, right? And I think this is one of the things that came out of the new view safety movement, which is that you can't do this kind of research from your office. They have to support each other, they have to support each other. So the food and one camp comment is pretty important. It really is, right? If you don't, if you don't get the data from the ground and feed it back into the research, you're not going to, you're not going to advance your understanding of the system anymore. On the other hand, if all you do is pull the data out, it's just extractive, right? You're just taking, taking from them and using it for your own purposes. So by doing this stuff over, we're going constantly back and forth and they feed off each other. Yeah, we saw this year. Okay. Now, here's a new insight. How do we deploy this new insight? Now, that new insight led us to some new ways to do things. All right. Let's feed that back into the research that that movement back and forth has been critical to the development of, you know, new view safety, safety to safety differently now resilience engineering, all of this kind of stuff. So this idea that, you know, you do the research and then you throw it over the fence into the practitioner community isn't, isn't, isn't going to be successful. They need each other. Well, yeah, we know it's not successful. And I think that's, that's a, so this is a remarkable thing. And it's really sort of introduced a new need in the resilience engineering community. And that is the ability to take information. And maybe this, I mean, I sure this could just be a normal blip in the development curve. I mean, this is probably not unusual. But you get to a point where now you have to start talking about how do I diffuse this information out. So it took us a while to build the body and knowledge or that's super elitist to build what we have of the body of knowledge is not like it's done right now. Now we have a body of knowledge, we have some ideas that are really powerful that we need to diffuse. And one of the questions I'd ask you, because I honestly don't know and I follow you guys pretty closely, is you don't talk much about success as a community. It's, you don't hear a lot of success stories. And you know they exist. I mean, it's not like they don't exist. So I think that that it's fair and it's not. I think those success stories, for better or worse, were great researchers were not good publicists. And so the success stories stay where they are, right? We've had great success in the IT, the SF community. And so we become, you know, that the research engineering community has become very well known in those communities because the message of success has spread, right? And some kinds of healthcare and increasingly now in aviation. But in terms of the broader, the broader audience, you're right, those messages, those messages of success, we don't, we don't, we talk a lot about ideas. We don't tout our own successes. Oh, totally. And let's talk about why. So let's unpack this. Why were you more successful in diffusing and getting a foothold in the IT community? Because you had people who were really good at interpreting what you're doing and talking about the success. So in this case, we could talk about John Ospoff, or it could be a whole another podcast. Absolutely. But one of the things he did really well was understand the concepts and talk about the success and actually market the success market, small and market market, market the success within the community. So people saw it as a benefit. Yeah. I think that's true. And part of it is we are slowly developing this base of, of kind of internal, internal thought leaders, right, in, in IT, in aviation. And those people need, they need, you know, Richard Cook did this in, in medicine and anesthesiology and critical care. Those people need to come from the community. Yeah. They can't come from. Yeah. Exactly right. They can't come from academia. Exactly right. It's a legit street cred in the community, you're exactly right. So then the key becomes, are you building, are you reaching out and building those relationships within the community? Or are you waiting for them to come to you? No. So I think this is where a lot of the, this kind of consortium building works because this is how we're, we're finding these people, right? So one of the, you know, through, we had a snafu catcher's consortium. That's how we got started in IT. So that's how we're doing it now. We're starting one in, in proactive safety. And so I think that's how we're finding these kind of internal discipline experts who have the credibility, who have the connections, who know the domain inside and out, who know these work areas inside and out. And this is, you know, I should have, I should have started with this, which is if you're, if you're working in industry and you're a practitioner and you don't have an academic partner, you're, you're hurting yourself. And I say this to my academic colleagues, if you are in academia, if you are a researcher and you don't have internal experts, if you don't have people in the field who are doing the work every day, you are hobbling your efforts to understand how the world work. You are limited. So if you are, regardless of who signs your paycheck, you need to, to find a university to work with. And if you work at a university, you need to find people who are in the field, who are leaders in the field, who are experimenting, who are trying new things, who are failing occasionally or frequently and, and, and work with them. I mean, people, on both sides, people in in-practitioners and academics are always saying, well, there's just, there's not, we can't get money, we can't get money. That's a hard part of it. I don't deny that. Finding money is difficult. But finding partners is critical. Yeah, I agree. I agree. And, and I think it's critical not just because it's how these ideas survive and thrive, but it's critical in that what you bring to the table actually makes the world a better, more resilient place. Right. Right. And, and I think if we lose track of the message that the ultimate benefit here is not the academic research, the ultimate benefit is that systems become less brittle, more resilient, more reliable, more dependable, the relationship between robustness and resilience, which David talks about all the time, which is, you know, is really an important message. Is out there making a difference? Absolutely. And, I mean, I'm not so, I'm not so philosophical to think that knowledge for knowledge sake is enough. Right. We're working in this because we want to improve human systems, one improve outcomes, we want to make the world safer, more resilient, more fault tolerant, except better able to, better match to the world, better able to survive challenges and thrive. So again, we're, we're on, we're online. We're saying the same thing, and I think we're, we are slowly getting there. If you're, if you're a practitioner and you're looking for a research partner, calls. If you're, if you, or call, find a university, there are, there are people who can help you. Right. And if you are working at a university, if you think of yourself as a researcher and you're not spending as much time as you can in the field, you're, you're not going to find the answers. I told you you'd like this one. I'm not a big fat liar. It's actually super cool. As you're, thank you for doing that, my friend. You are great. And I enjoyed it immensely. I hope you learned, so I'm, learned something new every single day, have as much fun as you possibly can, be good to each other, be kind to each other, and for goodness sake, you guys, be safe.