As you may have already heard, Dr Richard Cook passed away on August 31, 2022. I was fortunate to be able to get to know him and consider him both a mentor and a friend. It is in large part due to his advice and encouragement that Resilience Roundup exists today. It is a vast understatement to say that he is greatly missed.
In honor of Richard, this special issue is dedicated to him and his work.
Thank you to David Woods, John Allspaw, and Michael O’Connor for this wonderful article about him:
The Career, Accomplishments, and Impact of Richard I. Cook: A Life in Many Acts
Multiple professional and research communities feel a profound loss at the death of Richard I. Cook. Richard died peacefully at home on August 31, 2022 in the loving care of his wife Karen and his family. Dr. Richard Cook was a polymath who excelled in multiple careers, usually simultaneously. A physician and anesthesiologist, he was… Continue reading…
Here is a list of his work (along with co-authors) that I’ve featured and analyzed here before. It continues to be hugely relevant to our operation and understanding of complex systems and resilience:
A Few Observations on the Marvelous Resilience of Bone and Resilience Engineering – Resilience Roundup
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend redeploy this year. There were a lot of great talks and conversations and I took lots of notes. Thankfully, videos should be available at some point, you can click through to the link to get an email when they’re available. This week I’ll focus on Dr. […] Continue reading…
Resilience Engineering: New Directions for Measuring and Maintaining Safety in Complex Systems – Resilience Roundup
This week we have a big report by some names you’ll likely know, Sidney Dekker, Erik Hollnagel, David Woods and Richard Cook. Resilience Engineering: New directions for measuring and maintaining safety in complex systems This is a big, useful and important report, so I’ll be visiting it over the next few issues. This is a […] Continue reading…
Those Found Responsible Have Been Sacked – Resilience Roundup
Thanks to everyone who took the time to come say hi at Monitorama! It was my first one and I see why people enjoy it so much, I learned a lot! P.S. I’ll be speaking at SRECon APAC in Singapore this week, if you’re around, please come say hi!” Those found responsible have been sacked: […] Continue reading…
Nine Steps to Move Forward From Error – Resilience Roundup
Nine Steps to Move Forward from Error Quotes: “To understand failure, understand success in the face of complexities.” “To understand failure, look at what makes problems difficult.” “Safe organisations deliberately search for and learn about systemic vulnerabilities” “As capabilities, tools, organisations and economic pressures change, vulnerabilities to failure change as well.” This is a paper […] Continue reading…
Coping With a Mass Casualty: Insights Into a Hospital’s Emergency Response and Adaptations After the Formosa Fun Coast Dust Explosion – Resilience Roundup
Coping With a Mass Casualty: Insights into a Hospital’s Emergency Response and Adaptations After the Formosa Fun Coast Dust Explosion This is a paper by Sheuwen Chuang, David Woods, Hsien-Wei Ting, Richard Cook, and Jiin-Chyr Hsu that examines a disaster that occurred in 2015 in Taiwan where almost 500 people were injured when a flammable […] Continue reading…
Gaps in the Continuity of Care and Progress on Patient Safety – Resilience Roundup
This week we’re taking a look at an article that purposes a different way of looking at how practitioners create and influence safety. I’ve been experimenting with sending these out at different times, how are you liking the weekend editions? I’d love to hear about it, hit reply and let me know. Gaps in the […] Continue reading…
Going Solid: A Model of System Dynamics and Consequences for Patient Safety – Resilience Roundup
“Going solid”: a model of system dynamics and consequences for patient safety Richard Cook and Jens Rasmussen discuss the difficulties when systems move from a loosely coupled state to a very tightly coupled state and the effects that can occur as a result. They use the example of a hospital, but almost everything about the […] Continue reading…
Building and Revising Adaptive Capacity Sharing for Technical Incident Response: A Case of Resilience Engineering – Resilience Roundup
Building and revising adaptive capacity sharing for technical incident response: A case of resilience engineering This week we are taking a look at a paper by Richard Cook and Beth Adele Long. In it they study how an on-call team was able to share capacity. This case study highlights the engineering part of resilience engineering. […] Continue reading…
Collaborative Cross-Checking to Enhance Resilience – Resilience Roundup
Collaborative Cross-Checking to Enhance Resilience This is a paper by Emily Patterson, David Woods, Richard Cook, and Marta Render. In case you hadn’t seen me mention before, both Woods and Cook are part of Adaptive Capacity Labs who sponsor this issue, but they never get to choose what I review or write here. The authors […] Continue reading…
Above the Line, Below the Line – Resilience Roundup
Above the Line, Below the Line Another article from ACM Queue’s special edition, this week from Richard Cook (a principal at the current sponsor, Adaptive Capacity Labs), who writes about how we as software people interact with our systems and what the implications of that are. If you’ve followed much of Cook’s work, you’ll likely […] Continue reading…
Being Bumpable – Resilience Roundup
This week we have a paper that is more of a story from Dr. Richard Cook, published in Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making. It’s about an event at a teaching hospital that takes place in the ICU. Though the story takes place in a medical setting, there’s still lots to take […] Continue reading…
Mistaking Error – Resilience Roundup
Welcome back! So how’d it go last week? Did having fewer things to watch and read help you learn or focus more? I hope so! Following a similar pattern this week with two things, a chapter from the Patient Safety Handbook and an ~1 hr talk. Mistaking Error If you’ve been wanting somewhere to start, […] Continue reading…
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