Layer Aleph

?? We’re excited to share some highlights from this year’s GovTech Leaders Conference! A huge thank you once again to all our incredible speakers and participants who are passionate about public sector innovation ?? Check the comments for the conference video - we hope it brings even more inspiration! ??

There are dates for the next open-enrollment Layer Aleph "Crisis Engineering" workshop: July 30th - August 1st, 1000h-1600h EDT (UTC-4). If you have been on the waiting list, you've already received an email. Signups close July 19th, a week from today. Crisis Engineering is our level-best effort to package the skills, perspective, and behaviors that have worked best for Layer Aleph. Our firm has spent more than eight person-decades working to tame complex systems and drag organizational-change efforts past concrete milestones. Most of the time, we've been the effort that's called in after (all) other approaches have failed. Our approach works under trying and difficult circumstances. Our practice is drawn from the combination of our lived experience across organizations of every size, and what relevant empirical study we can find in sociology, organizational dynamics, and complex systems management. We iteratively preserve what works and discard what has not. Then we do our best to condense and pass it forward in a three day workshop format. Please come join us, and tell someone else. https://lnkd.in/gQBx6TZ8

By way of Tamara Srzenti? MS MBA, I am making two appearances at the "Creative Bureaucracy Festival" in Berlin tomorrow. In the keynote I will do my best to give away one of our best Layer Aleph trade secrets for making durable change in an organization. The secret is that most of the time you can't. Organizations are the same as people in that the only time it is possible to make a directed change to culture or habits is when the status quo has become utterly unsustainable. "It's bad" is not enough; the status quo is always "bad" to you. There must be an existential threat. If there is none, you are wasting your effort. This fact doesn't play well with the type of "civic tech" mindset which is about "I thought up a thing that I want to do and now all I have to do is get an 8000 person bureaucracy to do what I want." Thus, most people will not listen, and the secret will remain safe. The events are here: https://lnkd.in/gHsvCTMq I think you can watch a stream for free, although the time zone is not exactly convenient to the US.

A thing that happens with generative AI is that most people can see that when it tries to do *their* job, the results are mediocre at best. At the same time, they think it is good enough to replace *other* jobs. (See also, "Gell-Mann amnesia.") I wrote a guess at why that might be. https://lnkd.in/gXxxC8Qa

Hello .. It's been a few years, so to jog your memory: I used to manage SREs at Google, then I worked on healthcare dot gov, then I created the "U.S. Digital Service" in the Obama administration. Since 2017, I do consulting jobs with "Layer Aleph LLC," and since 2021, I teach a college class called "Managing Complex Systems." The common thread among SRE, USDS, and Layer Aleph is that we run intense, short sprints to repair or reorganize an organization and its systems. Doing ~50 such projects in the last 15 years, we have developed some repeatable processes and particular skills. We're calling it "crisis engineering" because we need to call it something. We're creating a professional-development style workshop to share those skills, and are taking applications for the first cohort (Jan 9-11): https://lnkd.in/g74aup6H Here's a little bit of a clue what the content will be like: https://lnkd.in/gXbXsGYS I'm not sure if there will be another time this is open to everyone. So if this is interesting at all, please check it out. We're using Maven in part because they help students get their employer reimbursements. Remember that if you leave your training budget unclaimed at the end of the year, the capitalists win.