Crisis Is Your Opening | Marina Nitze | Invisible Machines

About this episode

Marina Nitze discusses how crises can create opportunities for transformational change in organizations.

Most organizations treat crisis as a failure state. Marina Nitze sees it as a window. Nitze served as Chief Technology Officer of the Department of Veterans Affairs (the largest civilian agency in the country) during the healthcare.gov collapse. She helped rescue it, helped stand up the US Digital Service, and came out the other side with a question she and her colleagues have been pursuing ever since: why is it that crisis makes otherwise impossible transformational change possible? That question became a firm, Layer Aleph , and now a book, Crisis Engineering , co-authored with her colleagues. In this conversation, she walks through what a "useful crisis" actually looks like, the five indicators that distinguish it from chronic problems masquerading as crises, and the practitioner toolkit for standing up a crisis engineering center when the window opens, because the window is usually hours, not days. We also get into two stories that hit harder than any framework: the California unemployment system's call center that, when Nitze's team actually visited it, turned out to be a large room of empty cubicles — and a carbon copy form that two dedicated public servants were dutifully…

People in this episode

Guest: Marina Nitze

Topics covered

• technology
• business
• design

Keywords

• crisis
• transformational change
• Department of Veterans Affairs
• healthcare.gov
• US Digital Service
• Layer Aleph
• book
• impossible change

Mentioned in this episode

Products: GSX, Layer Aleph, Crisis Engineering

Books & works: Crisis Is Your Opening, Age of Invisible Machines, AIPodcast

Places: California

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