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World Congress 2022 • Jun 15, 2022

Empathy: The secret sauce of Resilience

Malin Litwinski

In production, all assumptions come to die. Discover how treating system failures like shared escape rooms rather than ticking bombs uses empathy to build a resilient engineering culture.

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#1 about 2 min

Connecting empathy to technical resilience in software development

Prioritizing empathy in tech organizations fosters highly productive teams while drastically reducing individual stress.

#2 about 2 min

Defining production resilience through reliability outcomes

Resilience acts as an upfront investment in the workforce to ensure high reliability during customer production experiences.

#3 about 1 min

Building a culture of rapid deployment and self-correction

Moving away from fear-based deployment freezes toward quick, self-correcting changes establishes a robust safety net for production.

#4 about 2 min

Analyzing incident responses to uncover organizational culture

Evaluating how a company investigates and learns from production incidents reveals its true capacity for self-correction.

#5 about 2 min

Overcoming hindsight bias by reframing incidents as surprises

Factoring human imperfection into complex systems shifts the focus from blaming individuals to learning from unpredictable surprises.

#6 about 2 min

Establishing continuous learning loops for system improvement

Applying an observational loop during unexpected outages transforms reactive patching into a repeatable skill for organizational improvement.

#7 about 3 min

Implementing proactive learning through scheduled chaos engineering

Intentionally experimenting on systems surfaces dark debt and builds confidence in application capability under turbulent conditions.

#8 about 3 min

Using empathy methods to reduce chaos engineering stress

Contextualizing scheduled experiments as collaborative puzzles rather than real emergencies prevents team burnout and panic.

#9 about 4 min

Separating work deadlines from personal frames of reference

Recognizing that workplace projects, deadlines, and hierarchies hold no real power over fundamental life priorities minimizes job anxiety.

#10 about 2 min

Accepting technological challenges and past coding mistakes

Demonstrating compassion for earlier decisions made without the benefit of hindsight fosters healthier iteration and team acceptance.

#11 about 6 min

Leveraging diverse problem-solving personas during system incidents

Encouraging varied perspectives like big picture thinkers and fresh sets of eyes prevents tunnel vision during critical troubleshooting.

#12 about 5 min

Structuring supportive on-call shifts and conducting chaos days

Pairing engineers during on-call rotations and avoiding surprise chaos experiments preserves morale and psychological safety.

Matching moments

2:05 min

Cultivating a learning-focused and empathetic engineering culture

Tom George · LIVE

3:00 min

Identifying examples of system resilience and fragility in technology

Jan de Vries Jan de Vries · WWC Europe 2026

3:23 min

Second-order cultural effects of practicing chaos engineering

Steve Upton Steve Upton · WWC 2022

2:08 min

Navigating and mitigating the impacts of broken engineering cultures

Oskar Kruschitz Oskar Kruschitz · Europe 2026 Virtual

2:38 min

Fostering team resilience amidst continuous technical requirement changes

Alexandra Wudel Alexandra Wudel +3 · WWC 2025

3:51 min

Viewing diversity and inclusion as core system resilience

Artur Ortega · A11y + AI

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