No Way Out Outmaneuver Complexity: AI Gold Rush 2.0 & Adaptive Capacity with David Woods, PhD
14 snips
Jul 29, 2025 
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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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.
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.
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.
