[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Literature on crisis response?
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: Literature on crisis response?
So I've always been interested in how teams respond to crises. I
love reading about teams that handle crises well, and try to figure
out what I can learn from their actions for the teams I lead.
(Apollo 13 continues to be an all-time favourite movie of mine...)
Recently, there've been two discussions on HN [1,2] that have
gotten me thinking about this topic again. And now I'm wondering:
are there any good books on the topic that you can recommend? I'm
not restricting myself to any domain - business, politics,
engineering, natural disasters, could all be interesting. [1]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26506920 [2]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26539495
Author : veddox
Score : 60 points
Date : 2021-03-25 11:22 UTC (1 days ago)
| jenkstom wrote:
| In the US all first responders are required to go through various
| levels of incident management. You can get free training on NIMS
| and ICS online. It works, and it works very well.
| cjbprime wrote:
| The obvious choice is aviation -- there are thousands of
| commercial accident reports, many of which lead to process
| improvements for everyone else afterwards, and general aviation
| emergencies every day. YouTube especially is full of ATC audio
| combined with radar visuals and commentary for emergencies.
|
| For tech, Dan Liu maintains a list of tech company incident
| public post-mortems: https://github.com/danluu/post-mortems
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| The climbing and mountaineering community is great about
| reviewing past accidents (especially deadly ones) to understand
| the root causes. Every year the American Alpine society produces
| a new volume of Accidents in North American Climbing and it's
| well worth a read:
| http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/about_the_acciden...
| Most things are human error like rappelling off the end of a
| rope, but there's usually a few really big team or trip planning
| failures like avalanches, etc.
|
| There's a podcast they do related to it called The Sharp End and
| it's worth a listen too: https://www.thesharpendpodcast.com/
| teachrdan wrote:
| I can't recommend this series enough. Most accidents are
| described in plain language in a page or two with a concise
| analysis at the end. From one analysis of people hurt in an ice
| avalanche: "if it looks like it is going to fall it is probably
| going to fall."
|
| You learn a lot of interesting facts you might never otherwise
| find out. In the above example, the avalanche was so powerful
| it generated an air blast in front of the debris that ejected
| sleeping campers out of their tents below.
|
| The authors also have a low-key sense of humor and a subdued
| flair for language. This series is where I learned the phrase
| "injuries incompatible with life," as in, "Rescuers spotted the
| missing climbers from a helicopter the next day but saw that
| they had sustained injuries incompatible with life." It really
| puts a failed git rebase in perspective.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Pagerduty has some very practical guidance on their website:
| https://response.pagerduty.com/
| sjg007 wrote:
| Is the best idea to plan for a crisis before it happens? I guess
| it would be a process that you engage in because you won't
| necessarily be able to predict the crisis in advance otherwise
| you'd mitigate it.
| sinac wrote:
| A great how to resource is Dealing With an Angry Public by Field
| and Susskind. https://www.amazon.com/Dealing-Angry-Public-
| Approach-Resolvi...
| markedathome wrote:
| The CDC has the Crisis & Emergency Risk Communication (CERC)
| manual[1], as well as a website covering this topic[2].
|
| [1] https://emergency.cdc.gov/cerc/ppt/cerc_2014edition_Copy.pdf
| https://emergency.cdc.gov/cerc/manual/index.asp
|
| [2] https://emergency.cdc.gov/cerc/index.asp
| secfirstmd wrote:
| If you want tackle advice on common types of crisis that can
| happen to people (malware, kidnap etc) feel free to check out
| our free open source app Umbrella. It's about 110k words, 40+
| lessons on best practices, in 7 languages. You can look for it
| on the app stores or find out more (https://www.secfirst.org)
| rockmeamedee wrote:
| The term "crisis response" will get you info on PR crises and
| brings to mind the TV show Scandal.
|
| The term you want for our field is "Incident Response", and the
| practice of 1)preventing them and 2)handling them 3)learning from
| them is Resilience Engineering. It's about investigating air
| plane crashes, nuclear meltdowns, errors during surgery, etc, and
| learning how humans keep complex systems running.
|
| I recommend "Behind Human Error" by David Woods as a great
| starter there. A key insight of this field is that incidents
| aren't just "some idiot didn't follow the safety checklist", but
| often the safety checklist itself will cause the issue; at some
| level the errors happen because of complicated interactions
| between the system and even the safety mechanisms.
|
| An interesting tech industry related document is the STELLA
| report [1] from a few tech companies comparing notes on
| incidents.
|
| [1] https://snafucatchers.github.io/
| kevin_nisbet wrote:
| Specific to books, "Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control
| From Mercury to Apollo 13" was pretty good from Gene Kranz and as
| I recall covered many of the incidents in the US space program. I
| don't think I ever found a copy of the Chris Kraft one but heard
| it's pretty good as well.
|
| And as others have suggested, reading flight accident reports, or
| watching the videos made off of them tends to be valuable.
|
| Also, I think NASA published a bunch of research on human factors
| at one point, but it's been a long time since I've looked it up.
|
| And last, specific to our industry, the SRE Books have a couple
| chapters on incident response: https://sre.google/books/
| villasv wrote:
| Jared Diamond's Upheaval is a bit off-topic I think but I still
| recommend it. It starts talking about personal crisis to
| extrapolate into nation crisis, which are both extremes compared
| to company or team crisis.
|
| Even if tangentially related, it's an interesting read if only
| for the historical content.
| bwh2 wrote:
| Drift Into Failure. Great book telling stories like airplane
| crashes and the Challenger disaster. I posted some notes on my
| website: https://www.briansnotes.io/book/drift-into-failure/
| mronge wrote:
| Here's a list of some of my favorite books dealing with crisis:
|
| - _In Thin Air_ - About a mountaineering expedition that turned
| into disaster on Mount Everest.
|
| - _Black Hawk Down_ - The story of hundreds of US special forces
| trapped in Mogadishu overnight after a mission went completely
| sideways
|
| - _Leadership in Turbulent Times_ - About different US presidents
| leading through crisis and how there is no one singular type of
| leadership
|
| - _The Hard Thing about Hard Things_ - Leading a startup on the
| verge of failure to an eventual massive acquisition
|
| - _The Sledge Patrol_ - How a small group, outgunned and out
| manned fought back Nazi invaders in Greenland
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| Several countries and lots of agencies use something called the
| Incident Command System (ICS). They use it to coordinate multi-
| agency response to things like explosions, toxic spills, massive
| wildfires, large-scale searches for missing persons, and more,
| all the way down to small and localized incidents.
|
| ICS courses are free to anyone who wants them. You can get
| started with ICS-700 here:
| https://training.fema.gov/is/courseoverview.aspx?code=IS-700...
|
| There are a few basic principles of ICS that should be useful to
| company incident response:
|
| 1. ICS defines specific roles and their responsibilities. In ICS,
| there is Planning, Logistics, Operations, Management and/or
| Coordinator, and Finance, among others. Each of these roles are
| defined ahead of time, and disaster response teams practice these
| roles regularly. Each role has defined ways of handing the role
| off to another person during a shift change and often includes
| specific forms that need to be filled out. This data collection
| is integral to being able to review the incident while it's
| happening, as well as after the fact for improving training.
|
| 2. ICS is scalable. For a very small incident, one person may be
| responsible for all roles. For a very large incident, response
| may be further subdivided into branches and divisions. This
| flexibility is an extremely important part of ICS, and it only
| works because everyone understands the different roles involved.
|
| 3. Under ICS, everyone has exactly _one_ boss, supervisor, etc.
| that they report to. Any of you who have had to try to go
| spelunking through logs while multiple suits keep contacting you
| for updates already understands how important this is. This
| structure also helps to minimize miscommunication during an
| incident.
|
| 4. In the planning section specifically, there's a process called
| the "Planning P" that describes a lifecycle of information
| gathering, decision-making, and communication. It's pretty
| straightforward and it resolves a lot of common issues in
| incident response. This is covered in ICS-201:
| https://training.fema.gov/is/courseoverview.aspx?code=is-201
|
| Companies developing their own incident response strategies will
| want to customize forms, data collection, roles, &etc., but the
| basic principles of ICS are an effective framework that should be
| adaptable to a wide variety of situations. Most companies on
| their worst day aren't dealing with an actual or potential loss
| of life; experienced ICS people can sleep-walk through a
| company's worst incident.
| theptip wrote:
| PagerDuty has some docs on this system:
| https://response.pagerduty.com/getting_started/
|
| And I believe this is the system Google recommends in their SRE
| books: https://sre.google/sre-book/managing-incidents/.
|
| It's a bit heavyweight for a small team but has some very
| useful concepts.
| Darkstryder wrote:
| With regard to the specific topic of _communicating_ through a
| crisis, I 've found _Masters of Disaster: The Ten Commandments of
| Damage Control_ by Christopher Lehane, Mark Fabiani and Bill
| Guttentag to be pretty interesting.
|
| The authors worked with multiple organizations and celebrities
| during time of crises and helped them with the public relation
| side of it. For instance they managed Bill Clinton's PR during
| the Monica Lewinsky events.
|
| The book is not perfect (I think it could be shortened a bit and
| retain the same information) but it is still very interesting and
| I think about it every time I witness someone getting themselves
| into a big, public crisis and making things worse by not managing
| their PR properly.
| pjmorris wrote:
| For more on the Apollo 13 crisis response, check out 'Apollo:
| Race to the Moon' by Murray and Cox. I haven't met a more
| detailed popular examination of the engineering and management
| effort behind the Apollo program, and they spend some time on the
| 'back room' of engineers depicted in the film.
|
| I'm reminded of 'The Medical Detectives', Roueche, but only by
| reputation (I own a copy I haven't read.) "In each true story,
| local health authorities and epidemiologists race against time to
| find the clue to an unknown and possibly fatal disease."
|
| If you interpret 'The enemy might get the bomb before we do' as a
| crisis, 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', Rhodes, is a detailed
| (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) examination of how we got from
| discovering the atom's nucleus to the consequences of deploying
| city-destroying weapons in a generation or so.
|
| You might find general systems theory interesting, maybe
| 'Thinking In Systems', Meadows, and/or 'An Introduction to
| General Systems Thinking', Weinberg.
| max_ wrote:
| Catastrophy bonds in my opinion are the most practical way manage
| effective crisis response.
|
| I wrote about pandemic bonds last year [0].
|
| [0]: https://as1ndu.xyz/2020/02/fighting-of-disease-pandemics-
| wit...
| jkingsbery wrote:
| This week's EconTalk talked about the general problem of
| responding to crises, and I found the guest's (and host's) take
| interesting (https://www.econtalk.org/megan-mcardle-on-
| catastrophes-and-t...). They talked about how often we respond to
| infrequent crises by trying to prevent them from happening again,
| but then that investment goes to waste because that crises
| doesn't happen again (or doesn't happen for a long time, after
| which the investment has depreciated). They both advocated for
| focusing on being more responsive to crises, since adaptability
| can help more generally across many types of crises.
| yodon wrote:
| If you're operating at a scale or in a domain where crisis-like
| issues are expected (which is probably true if you're asking a
| question like this), The Checklist Manifesto[0] is a great read.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-
| Right/...
| cinntaile wrote:
| I read this book a while ago based on the fact that a lot of HN
| users recommended it, but I didn't think it was that great. It
| could have been 5 pages to get the point across, but that
| doesn't sell a book. It's been a while but if I recall
| correctly you could summarize it to: "If it's important to not
| miss any steps, use a checklist. Don't have too many or people
| will skip it. Only include relevant steps. Checklists are
| useless if they're not followed." I'm probably butchering it a
| little though to be fair, if it interests you give it a chance.
| yesenadam wrote:
| What is the point of this kind of comment? You can summarize
| an X page book in X/10 words. So what?
|
| A 200 page book (about anything, I don't mean about
| checklists) written entirely in the style of your summary
| would be unreadable. Or it would be some kind of reference,
| like man pages, usually not something people read with
| pleasure, and not something to introduce you to a topic.
|
| Aside from that, I found the memorable thing about the book
| to be the stories of how surprisingly effective checklists
| are, what a difference they can make, and how and why things
| have gone wrong without them. All that stuff you would cut as
| superfluous.
|
| Non-fiction books, like functions in a program, don't have to
| be great; it's enough if they do one thing and do it well.
| The book did that, and very memorably.
| yodon wrote:
| Like most "business books" it's designed to be read during a
| single bowel movement by a normal person with normal
| digestive functions.
|
| The book offers a single unit of recommendations, a good one
| that's worth reading, but definitely not the complete works
| of Shakespeare.
| tjalfi wrote:
| Total Loss[0] has 45 stories of yachting disasters; the lesson I
| took away is to carry a knife when you're on a boat.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/Total-Loss-Collection-First-hand-
| Acco...
| eschneider wrote:
| As someone who used to work on lobster boats, they tell you to
| bring TWO knives. When the pot goes to the bottom accidentally
| roped to your leg, you always panic and drop knife one. You
| need knife two to actually cut yourself free.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Volokalamsk Highway by Alexandr Bek
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1769643.Volokolamsk_High...
| It's an old book, so your best chance is an ebook.
| http://ciml.250x.com/archive/literature/english/alexander_be...
|
| It's about leadership during crises and it's based on real
| events. Telling the story of a small battalion stopping German
| army en route to Moscow in 1941. At some point it was a required
| reading in some military schools (like in Israel for example,
| maybe even now).
| WmyEE0UsWAwC2i wrote:
| Nassim Taleb, Antifragile
| abee wrote:
| Never waste a good crisis when it comes to politics - read this
| book [The Shock Doctrine by Naomi
| Klein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-26 23:02 UTC)