The good news: Incidents are by-products of the complexity that comes with growing a successful business.

The bad news: These surprises are disruptive, painful and costly. You’re losing money and time dealing with them. Worse, your company isn’t learning much from them. The response to incidents is mostly localized and short-term “fixes.”

Helping organizations handle this “incident ROI” dilemma is what we do.

Incidents are unplanned investments. They’re also opportunities. We can help you:

• understand what your incidents are trying to tell you, and
• learn from these painful experiences.

ACL brings research-driven methods and approaches to drive effective incident analysis in software-reliant organizations.

Our work goes beyond typical template-driven “postmortem” analyses.

We have over four decades of experience with incident analysis and organizational learning from events in complex systems. We’ve worked with organizations in tech, medicine, aerospace, finance, and manufacturing. We study decision making, problem detection and identification, and diagnosis and response coordination — all under “normal” conditions of increasing pressure, complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty, and high consequences of failure.

The most valuable part of our work is when our clients learn how to direct this deep-level analysis themselves and build an internal community of incident analysts.

We’ve worked on incidents you know and ones you’ll never hear about. Just to be clear: people don’t call us up to discuss the weather and how well things are going. They call us because of trouble, sometimes scary trouble.

We are experts in trouble.