Controlling a process we don’t understand
I was attending the Resilience Engineering Association – Naturalistic Decision Making Symposium last month, and one of the talks was by a medical doctor (an anesthesiologist) who was talking about analyzing incidents in anesthesiology. I immediately thought of Dr. Richard Cook, who is also an anesthesiologist, who has been very active in the field of resilience engineering, and I wondered, “what is it with anesthesiology and resilience engineering?” And then it hit me: it’s about process control.
As software engineers in the field we call “tech”, we often discuss whether we are really engineers in the same sense that a civil engineer is. But, upon reflection I actually think that’s the wrong question to ask. Instead, we should consider the fields there where practitioners are responsible for controlling a dynamic process that’s too complex for humans to fully understand. This type of work involves fields such as spaceflight, aviation, maritime, chemical engineering, power generation (nuclear power in particular), anesthesiology, and, yes, operating software services in the cloud.
We all have displays to look at to tell us the current state of things, alerts that tell us something is going wrong, and knobs that we can fiddle with when we need to intervene in order to bring the process back into a healthy state. We all feel production pressure, are faced with ambiguity (is that blip really a problem?), are faced with high-pressure situations, and have to make consequential decisions under very high degrees of uncertainty.
