Adaptive Capacity Labs (ACL) is a specialized consultancy that has built something rare and difficult to replicate: deep expertise in how engineers actually think, decide, and coordinate during high-stakes operations — and a proven methodology for helping organizations get dramatically better at learning from failure.
Bridging Cognitive Science and Software Operations
ACL’s core intellectual asset is its ability to translate decades of empirical research from Cognitive Systems Engineering, Naturalistic Decision Making, Resilience Engineering, and Human Factors into practical frameworks that software organizations can immediately apply.
These aren’t scientific fields most technology companies have access to — they study how skilled practitioners manage complexity under pressure in domains like aviation, healthcare, and military operations. ACL makes this body of knowledge actionable for engineering teams building and operating distributed systems at scale. This bridging capability is exceptionally scarce: it requires genuine fluency in both the research literature and the lived reality of modern software operations.
Pioneering Post-Incident Analysis
ACL has redefined what it means to investigate a software incident. Drawing on the same investigative rigor used by the NTSB and analogous bodies, ACL trains and coaches organizations to build in-house incident analysis capabilities that go far beyond traditional root-cause-analysis playbooks. ACL’s approach treats incidents as windows into how an organization’s systems, tools, and people actually function — surfacing the adaptive capacities that prevented worse outcomes alongside the conditions that contributed to failure. Clients spanning global technology platforms, financial institutions, healthcare providers, and government agencies have engaged ACL to develop these capabilities internally, creating durable organizational competence rather than dependency on outside consultants.
When incidents attract board-level or public scrutiny — where stakeholder visibility creates reputational risk — ACL is brought in as a neutral, independent party to conduct rigorous analysis that stakeholders can trust precisely because of ACL’s methodological credibility and independence.
Learning, Not Just Fixing
The dominant industry pattern after incidents is to generate action items and move on. ACL has led a fundamental reframing: the goal is organizational learning, not just remediation. This means helping organizations understand the gap between how work is imagined and how work is actually performed, identifying what went right alongside what went wrong, and building the richest understanding of incidents, for the broadest possible audience.
This perspective — rooted in Safety-II and the “New View” of human error — is increasingly recognized as essential, but few organizations know how to operationalize it. ACL does.
Churchkey and Tool Innovation
ACL doesn’t just advise — it also builds. Churchkey, ACL’s patented toolset, is a textbook example of Cognitive Systems Engineering-informed design: built from direct observation of how practitioners actually work, not from assumptions about how they should work. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted six patents on Churchkey, with the first issued in record time — a strong signal of genuine novelty. Additional tools have been developed for incident command situational assessment as well as supporting leaders, who face the common dilemma of being responsible for outcomes but at a significant distance from the details.
Churchkey and ACL’s broader prototyping work represent a pipeline of CSE-designed capabilities built from years of observing diverse organizations managing real operational complexity.
The Grafana Opportunity
ACL’s value to Grafana Labs is both strategic and concrete. Grafana is building the platform engineers turn to when things go wrong — and ACL has spent years studying exactly what engineers need in those moments, grounded in the most rigorous available science of human cognition under pressure. ACL brings: a deep understanding of how observability tools should support (not undermine) expert decision-making; design principles derived from ecological interface design and abstraction hierarchy analysis; direct relationships with engineering organizations who are already ACL clients and Grafana users; and a patent portfolio protecting genuinely novel approaches to supporting incident response.
The intellectual lineage matters here too. ACL was co-founded by Richard Cook, one of the most influential voices in resilience engineering and complex systems safety, whose work (including “How Complex Systems Fail”) is canonical in the field. That foundation — combined with years of client engagement across industries — gives ACL a depth of insight into operational cognitive work that would take any organization years and significant investment to develop independently.
ACL is small by design, but its influence, intellectual property, and accumulated observational knowledge of how engineers work under pressure represent an asset that is both strategically significant and effectively impossible to build from scratch.
John Allspaw has worked in software systems engineering and operations for over twenty years in many different environments. John’s publications include the books The Art of Capacity Planning (2009) and Web Operations (2010) as well as the foreword to “The DevOps Handbook.” His 2009 Velocity talk with Paul Hammond, “10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation” helped start the DevOps movement. John served as CTO at Etsy, and holds an MSc in Human Factors and Systems Safety from Lund University.
Beth Adele Long is a writer and software engineer with over twenty years of experience building, maintaining, and repairing web systems (mostly repairing). While at New Relic, she led the collaboration with the SNAFUcatchers consortium. With Dr. Richard Cook, Beth co-authored “Building and revising adaptive capacity sharing for technical incident response: A case of resilience engineering,” the first academic paper on Resilience Engineering in the software domain.
Colette Alexander has been working as an engineering leader in the software industry for 10+ years. Her obsession with learning from incidents and Resilience Engineering began while managing teams at Spotify. It eventually led her to pursue her Masters in Science at Lund University in Human Factors and Systems Safety. She has led organizations in SRE and observability at HashiCorp and Cognite. She also maintains an active composition and recording career as a rock cellist, and lives with her rescue dog, 2 kids and husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
CLIENTS
Names are withheld per non-disclosure agreements
Technology & Infrastructure
- Leading Networking Provider: This global networking company provides the hardware and software that serve as the fundamental backbone of the modern internet. They specialize in connecting and securing everything from small home offices to massive, complex data centers.
- Global Enterprise Solutions Firm: Known for its legacy in mainframe technology, this company now leads the charge in hybrid cloud, AI, and quantum computing. They focus on providing enterprise-level consulting and high-end technological solutions for the world’s largest organizations.
- Distributed Application Platform: This platform allows developers to deploy their applications on “micro-VMs” that run on servers located physically close to their users. By transforming traditional cloud hosting into a distributed global network, they help apps run faster and scale more efficiently.
- Major Productivity & Cloud Platform: A household name in computing, this company dominates the productivity space with a widely used office suite and a leading cloud platform. They continue to shape the future of work by integrating advanced AI across their entire ecosystem of software and hardware.
Fintech & Banking
- Regional Bank with a Long History: This bank is one of the largest privately owned banks in the U.S., boasting a history that spans over 160 years. They offer a full suite of banking services while maintaining a reputation for community-focused, independent financial management.
- Online Trading Services Provider: This UK-based firm provides online trading services, specializing in spread betting and contracts for difference (CFDs) for retail investors. They offer access to thousands of global financial markets through their sophisticated, high-speed trading platforms.
- Latin American Digital Neobank: Based in Brazil, this company has disrupted the Latin American banking sector as one of the world’s largest and most successful digital neobanks. They offer no-fee credit cards and mobile-first financial services designed to be transparent and accessible to everyone.
- Cloud Accounting Software Provider: This cloud-based accounting software is a favorite among small business owners for its user-friendly interface and automation features. It streamlines tasks like invoicing and payroll, giving entrepreneurs a real-time look at their financial health from any device.
Specialized Software & Services
- Health Information Technology Solutions Provider: Now owned by a larger technology corporation, this company provides health information technology solutions that connect people and systems at thousands of facilities globally. Their software helps clinicians make better-informed decisions while managing the complex data behind modern patient care.
- Revenue Management & Customer Engagement Solutions Provider: This company provides the revenue management and customer engagement tools that keep the world’s biggest telecom and media companies running smoothly. They handle the “behind the scenes” complexity of billing and digital payments for millions of global subscribers.
- Global Travel Technology Leader: This company operates a massive portfolio of brands that help people book everything from flights and hotels to vacation rentals. Their platforms aggregate data from across the globe to simplify the process of planning a trip from start to finish.
- Food Delivery Platform: A pioneer in the food-delivery space, this company connects hungry diners with a massive network of local restaurants via an easy-to-use mobile app. They provide the logistics and technology that help small eateries reach a wider audience of customers.
- Global Employment Listings Platform: As the world’s most-visited job site, this company serves as a massive search engine for employment listings gathered from across the web. They offer tools for resume hosting and company reviews to help bridge the gap between job seekers and hiring managers.
- Software Studio Focused on Complex Environments: This software studio specializes in “human-centered” design for complex environments where the stakes are incredibly high. They often work with defense and healthcare sectors to build interfaces that help people make sense of overwhelming amounts of data.
- Construction Management Platform: This platform is the industry standard for construction management, helping contractors and owners collaborate on massive building projects. It keeps blueprints, budgets, and communication in one place to ensure projects are finished on time and within scope.
- Team Communication Platform: This platform is the team communication tool that effectively replaced the dreaded “Reply All” internal email thread for modern businesses. It uses channel-based messaging and thousands of integrations to create a centralized hub for workplace collaboration.
- Audio Streaming Giant: This company revolutionized the music industry by giving users instant access to millions of songs and podcasts for a monthly fee. Their sophisticated recommendation algorithms have fundamentally changed how the world discovers new artists and audio content.
Government & Agencies
- Advanced Research Agency: This government body is responsible for developing high-risk, high-reward technologies for national security. They are known for their innovative approach to defense technology development.
- Intellectual Property Agency: The federal agency that grants patents for new inventions and registers trademarks for brand identification. By protecting intellectual property, they provide the legal framework that encourages innovation and economic growth in the U.S.
- Pan-European Air Traffic Coordination Organization: This intergovernmental organization coordinates air traffic management across Europe to ensure safe, seamless, and efficient flight operations. They act as the central “network manager” for the continent, balancing flight demand with airspace capacity while driving the technical standards for a unified European air traffic control system.