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, nah, this stuff is really on the fringe of – you can't really do that unless you have the technical background. Music.

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, 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 a normal human being. You can talk about anything.

You don't even need to talk about fancy pants, resilient 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. wow, 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. And 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 way to eat 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 germ potato, mustard base. There's vinegar base.

There's a ton of different potato salads. salads all of them fall into the taste delicious category which is you know one of my favorite categories if if you uh press me on that and so that's a good thing for me i'm doing 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, um, they tell me filling up. I haven't really looked cause I don't have to look at that stuff, but I do know there's going to be a lot of bike riding.

Cause I just did, I just did a, 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, I'm getting good bike riding. And I mean, it's happening. So that's a plus. So, so I've got I had 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. Now, 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 sat 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 to 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 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. Are you guys frustrated with the amount of uptake your message is getting or not getting? I mean, 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 it's 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, you know, Dave Woods, Eric Holmagle, you know, Richard Cook, Mike Rayo, that these folks are true luminaries. Yeah. Like there's that that that's at this point.

Unconvinced. 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. Right. They get 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 part concerns me. made. But if I say this, I mean this in the most loving way I can say that. I'm not sure you can blame the reader. No. And 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 make this message accessible, right? We've been really good at coming up with interesting, new, useful, good ideas. We haven't been good at communicating those widely.

Is part of the reason that's the case is kind of the if you build it, they will come theory?

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 think that's part of it. I think the other part of it is that there was, and I think still is, this belief that if we can build this thing out, if we add enough and make it complete enough, it will be clear. And I don't know that that's really holding true.

I think the better thing for us to do is say, look, here's the state of the science right now. We don't know everything. thing. 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. Um, and, and, you know, the places where we have gotten traction. Um, you know, are places that have tangible frequent experiences with failure, like, you know, that, that HRO would have suggested and these kinds of things.

Um, 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 and 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 so that exclusive access to people of science,

is that helping you diffuse 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 an interesting choice.

So I think there's two things, right? 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 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 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 i mean that in a loving way but i mean you 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 and there's a little bit of elitism here

i mean yeah you know what i mean but it's common i think there's elitism in physics is elitist i mean 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. Why won't you just get it? Yeah, exactly.

Why won't you just get it? And I don't know that it's necessarily kind of like an intellectual elitism as much as a response to this kind of frustration that please let me help you. Why won't you let me help you? Do you know what I mean? But the scientists that are most successful in math 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 a, 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 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. Right. It's interesting then. That community is way larger than we think it is. Absolutely. Way larger. 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 on-site short course in introduction to cognitive systems and resilience engineering. And, you know, that has been incredibly successful because we can get organizations to say, you know what, I can take my teams offline for a week. 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 get a PhD or whatever. So I think we are just starting that. I think it's fair to say that we missed some opportunities along the way. Yeah, but 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 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 in uncertainty. Uncertainty is 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. And 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. 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 an 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 who are 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. Yeah. 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. But so what I would say is that the. The ivory tower academies have their place, right? We do need these protected places where we can do this kind of research. So I don't know that it's – 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.

Community and and that has long been i mean from the beginnings of this 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 like i think that's that's the so that's a really good 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. So you're right. 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 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. Have you 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 this is really probably true for you guys, is that you start at 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. So I think that that has traditionally been true. I'm not sure that's as true now as it has been in the past.

Give me an example of where it's not true. And that is a 100% selfish question because I want to go and look.

Yeah. So I think we could point to some of these kinds of short course options that we're doing and some of these kinds of –. OSU, a shameless plug for OSU. Oh, no, plug away. The Cognitive Systems Engineering Lab, 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 working 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've done, here's a 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 what? We're running out of adaptive capacity, right? So we are seeing language and idea changes in the organizations where we are directly embedded.

Yeah, 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 we're kind of sort of circling around it, which is 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, recognize 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. Right. Now, let's start at the very beginning. Tell me about your work. All right. This is what 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.

Then we have – 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 come you're not doing 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 week-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 week-long workshop or to an extent are kind of scared to go to a week-long workshop. It could be scary.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you know, especially if you, if you come from an industry or you don't have an educational background, it can be, it can be intimidating to ask to show up and, and stand in front of, you know, one 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 have 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, I mean, the resiliency community 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 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. I don't think it can be column A or column B. 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 foot in one camp comment is pretty important. It really is. If you don't get the data from the ground and feed it back into the research, 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. You're just taking from them and using it for your own purposes. So by doing this stuff, we're going constantly back and forth and they feed

off each other. Yeah, we saw this here. Okay, now here's a new insight.

How do we deploy this new insight? that that new insight led us to 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 that you know you do the research and then you you throw it over the fence into the practitioner community isn't isn't

isn't going to be successful they need each other there 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 actually 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 of knowledge or that's super elitist to build what we have of the body of knowledge it's not like it's done right right but 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 You don't talk much about success as a community. 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 it's fair and it's not. I think those success stories, for better or worse –. We're great researchers. We're not good publicists. And so the success stories stay where they are, right? We've had great success in the IT, the SME community.

And so we've become, you know, the resilience engineering community has become very well known in those communities because the message of success has spread, right? In some kinds of healthcare and increasingly now in aviation. But in terms of the broader audience, you're right. Those messages of success, 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 Ossoff or it could be a whole nother podcast. 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 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 kind of internal thought leaders, right, in IT, in aviation. And those people, they need, you know, Richard Cook did this in medicine and anesthesiology. 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. They have to have the legit street cred in the community. You're exactly right. And 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? So I think this is where a lot of the – this kind of consortium building works because this is how we're finding these people, right? Right. So one of the, you know, through we had a snafu catchers consortium. That's how we got started in IT. So that's how we're doing it now. We're starting one 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 started with this, which is if you're working in industry and you're a practitioner and you don't have an academic partner, 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 works.

You are limited. it. So if you are, regardless of who signs your paycheck, you need 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 work with them. I mean, people on both sides, people 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. I agree. I agree. 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. I agree. 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 really an important message, is out there making a difference. Absolutely. And, I mean, I'm not so philosophical to think that knowledge for knowledge's sake is enough.

We're working in this because we want to improve human systems. We want to improve outcomes. We want to make the world safer, more resilient, more fault tolerant, better able to – better matched to the world, better able to survive challenges and thrive. So, again, we're online. We're saying the same thing. And I think we are slowly getting there. If you're a practitioner and you're looking for a research partner, call us. If you're – or call – find a university.

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 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. Asher, thank you for doing that, my friend. And you are great. And I enjoyed it immensely. I hope you learn 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 sakes, you guys. Music.