Richard Cook

Adaptive Capacity Labs, LLC

Adaptive Capacity Labs, LLC brings experts from industry and academia together to address the complex and demanding situations that confront information technology dependent firms. We work with clients to build sustainable adaptive capacity. The complex, rapidly changing, and competitive world requires businesses to adapt in order to manage challenges and to take advantage of opportunities. The ability to adapt is deeply embedded in organizations and technical systems. The response to incidents is crucial to information technology intensive commerce. All large systems have such events, and learning lessons from them is essential if firms are to prosper. Although incidents are often counted as a cost of doing business, they are better understood as unplanned investments in system integrity and performance. We partner with firms to maximize the ROI on these investments. Our principals have broad and deep experience with accidents, incidents, outages, degradations, and privacy breaches. They have decades of experience responding to accidents and incidents in information technology, medicine, aviation, nuclear power, and other domains. They are internationally recognized experts in assisting organizations in managing the aftermath of high-consequence events. We have developed methods to: • identify critical features of an event and response • summarize and communicate these features to specific and general audiences • compare and contrast multiple events and responses to extract meaningful patterns • identify organizational and technical factors that contribute to events and responses • improve individual and organizational capacity to use event experience for productive change Benefits of engaging us include: • better understanding by technical staff of how their systems behave and fail • improved event crisis management capacity • increased quality of post-event reviews • actionable insights into events and their implications • increased competence at managing development and operations