Effective learning from incidents is only possible if the incidents are well understood
Adaptive Capacity Labs is offering a 6-week Incident Analysis workshop series in early 2025. The workshops are designed for experienced practitioners looking to build the foundational skills necessary to get the most value from incidents.
We draw on real cases in which participants learn critical analytic and investigational skills in a hands-on, learning-by-doing experience.
Structure & Topics
Each week, participants attend two online workshops. Workshops consist of lectures, exercises, and group discussion. This structure is designed to minimize burden on the participants’ time and attention.
Participants from any organization are welcome, but are expected to have experience both handling incidents and participating in or leading post-incident activities.
Our experience is clear that effective incident analysis is a “team sport,” so each company must send at least two participants.
Topics include:
- What is an incident?
- Our approach for iterative incident analysis that yields the richest possible understanding for the broadest possible audience.
- Recognizing important decisions, actions, and junctures during and immediately after an incident.
- What makes an incident case warrant an in-depth analysis?
- Debriefing and interviewing techniques
- What is a theme? How do you identify themes during analysis?
- What makes an analysis credible?
- What does good review meeting facilitation look like?
- What are signals that the organization is making progress in learning from incidents more effectively?
Incidents in modern software-driven businesses present opportunities that are much greater than is typically recognized. Developing effective countermeasures, preventative designs, and other improvements require understanding an incident in deeper ways than simply when it occurred, how long it lasted, and what the customer impact was. This deeper understanding comes from reconstructing the event(s) in the context they were in, exploring the multiple perspectives of those who are responsible for responding to the incident and those defending the organization from these types of events, and connecting them in ways that have lasting influence on the business.
“Learning from failure” does not come from filling out a template and plotting shallow data on a chart. It means developing and maintaining the expertise to know how to analyze incidents deeply, identify which elements of the event are most valuable and which are not, and synthesizing this in ways that provide the greatest insight for the broadest audience possible.
Most importantly, it means doing this analyses efficiently, because businesses cannot wait for a dissertation to be published every time an outage happens.
We will train you to do this.
Cost & Logistics
- Fee
- The cost for enrolling an organization is $10,000 ($5,000 each for 2 participants)
- 20% discount for additional registrants ($4,000 each)
- Payment due upon acceptance into the workshop
- 26 total hours of sessions
- Workshops will begin the week of January 20, 2025 (exact days & times TBD)
- Attendance will be capped at 24 total participants, with a minimum of 3 participating organizations.
- Workshops are held under the Chatham House Rule, expecting that participants not reveal the identity of individuals or organizations outside the workshop.
How to Apply
If you’re interested in attending, start by completing a brief application. We’ll consider participants’ time zones and other constraints as we decide on the exact days and times of workshops, so applicants who are accepted will be able to verify that the workshop series schedule works for them before finalizing registration.
