Malin Litwinski

Empathy: The secret sauce of Resilience

What if the key to building resilient software isn't more code, but more empathy?

Empathy: The secret sauce of Resilience
#1about 2 minutes

Why empathy is crucial for resilient engineering teams

An empathetic culture reduces stress and improves productivity for engineers in an industry where systems will inevitably break.

#2about 2 minutes

Understanding resilience as an investment in reliability

Resilience is the cultural investment made in a team to ensure a product remains reliable for customers, even when things go wrong in production.

#3about 5 minutes

Shifting from blame to learning in incident analysis

By treating incidents as surprises and acknowledging human imperfection, teams can move past hindsight bias and focus on learning instead of blame.

#4about 3 minutes

Moving from reactive fixes to proactive chaos engineering

Chaos engineering is a discipline for proactively experimenting on a system to build confidence, turning the reactive outage learning loop into a scheduled experiment.

#5about 7 minutes

Using frame of reference to make chaos experiments less stressful

The "bomb vs. escape room" analogy illustrates how framing chaos experiments as controlled, safe challenges separates them from real-life crises and reduces stress.

#6about 2 minutes

Adopting a mindset of acceptance and improvement

Instead of dwelling on mistakes, teams should accept the current state without blame and focus on making things better, recognizing everyone did their best.

#7about 3 minutes

Building effective teams with diverse skill sets

A resilient team needs a mix of roles like the detail-diver, big-picture painter, and mood-maker, rather than being composed solely of subject matter experts.

#8about 3 minutes

Fostering inclusion by valuing every team member's contribution

Creating an inclusive environment where new members feel safe to ask simple questions is crucial for uncovering blind spots and fostering innovation.

#9about 4 minutes

Q&A on building chaos days and managing on-call stress

The speaker answers audience questions about creating your own "escape room" chaos day, handling on-call duties, and the problem with unannounced chaos experiments.

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