In this discussion, Dr. David Woods, a pioneer of resilience engineering, delves into how organizations can build adaptive capacity in complex environments. He reflects on lessons from high-risk industries, where prioritizing short-term productivity leads to fragile systems that can break under pressure. Woods argues for the need to reframe our mental models to better navigate change, drawing parallels between biological adaptability and organizational resilience. With compelling examples from aviation and crisis management, he highlights the importance of long-term thinking and psychological safety.
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insights INSIGHT
Second AI Gold Rush Insight
The "second AI gold rush" repeats patterns from the first but with more powerful AI and AGI hype.
New AI technologies add capabilities but also introduce new complexities and vulnerabilities to systems.
insights INSIGHT
Growth of Complexity
New technology generates capability growth that creates new complexities and penalties.
Pretending complexity is linear leads to ignoring nonlinear dynamics and inevitable surprises.
insights INSIGHT
Adaptive Capacity & Extensibility
Adaptive capacity means the future-oriented potential to change actions and models as situations differ from expectations.
Graceful extensibility lets systems reprioritize and reconfigure to avoid brittle collapse from saturation under stress.
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What happens when our increasingly interconnected systems face unexpected challenges? Dr. David Woods, pioneer of resilience engineering, explores how organizations can build the adaptive capacity needed to survive in an age of growing complexity.
Drawing from decades studying high-risk industries, Woods frames our current technological moment with historical perspective. The "second AI gold rush" unfolds with familiar patterns – promising seamless automation while overlooking the inevitable new complexities and vulnerabilities that emerge. Through compelling examples from Boeing's 737 MAX disasters to financial system collapses, he demonstrates how brittle systems eventually break when organizations prioritize short-term productivity over long-term resilience.
Woods introduces core principles of adaptive organizations – graceful extensibility, the capacity to reconfigure and reprioritize under pressure, and the critical ability to anticipate approaching saturation points before collapse occurs. He challenges the linear thinking that dominates most organizations, explaining why reframing – updating our mental models to match changing reality – proves so difficult yet essential for survival.
Whether you're navigating organizational challenges, interested in the future of human-AI collaboration, or seeking to understand resilience in an uncertain world, this episode provides essential frameworks for thinking differently about complexity, surprise, and adaptation when failure isn't an option.
John R. Boyd's Conceptual Spiral was originally titled No Way Out. In his own words:
“There is no way out unless we can eliminate the features just cited. Since we don’t know how to do this, we must continue the whirl of reorientation…”
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No Way Out 
