Chapter 10. Humanistic Chaos
I’m faced with a question that has been bothering me for quite some time. How can I apply what I know about Chaos Engineering to human systems? When I first learned about the emerging field of Chaos Engineering, to say I was intrigued would be putting it lightly. Injecting failure into a system purposefully to help you better understand your system? I was sold right away. As a “new view” safety nerd and systems thinker, I can get behind a paradigm that acknowledges the systems we use every day are inherently unsafe. My initial hypothesis was if Chaos Engineering practices were designed to run against distributed web systems, then they could also be applied to other distributed systems we interact with on a daily basis—systems that are all around us, systems that form our daily lives.
What if we could apply the field of Chaos Engineering not only to the complex distributed technical systems we know and love, but to the complex distributed systems known as organizations? An organization is one giant system of systems, so why shouldn’t the same rules apply? In this chapter I will lay out three real-world case studies of putting Chaos Engineering principles into practice within the Platform Operations team I lead, as well as the greater Product Development organization at SportsEngine, and hope to give you the tools to apply these same techniques within your own organization.
Humans in the System
In an organization, the fundamental unit or ...
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