Matt Stratton

When humans are faced with a traumatic experience, our brains kick in with survival mechanisms. These mechanisms are the familiar fight or flight response, but can also include the freeze response - which occurs when we are terrified or feel that there is no chance of escape. In this talk I will explain the background of fight, flight, and freeze, and how it applies to organizations. Based on my own experiences with post-traumatic stress (PTS), I will give examples and suggestions on how to identify your own organizational trauma and how to help heal it.

Over the course of the Avengers storyline, everything has been leading up to the ultimate outage—when Thanos snapped his fingers, eliminating half of all life in the universe. Come along with me on a journey to perform a retrospective on this greatest of all incidents in the Marvel universe. What were the contributing factors? How could the Avengers have followed better incident response procedures? And can this be reviewed in a truly blameless fashion? In this talk, I will revisit the storyline across the Marvel Cinematic Universe that led up to a critical event: the “Snap,” when Thanos removes half of all life in the universe at the end of Avengers: Infinity War, as well as the resolution displayed in Avengers: Endgame. We will explore the activities of the incident response teams (the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and more), to discover what they did well, what they could have done better, and why S.H.I.E.L.D. needs to invest in better Incident Response training.

Richard Dawkins described memes as being a form of cultural propagation, which is a way for people to transmit social memories and cultural ideas to each other. Not unlike the way that DNA and life will spread from location to location, a meme idea will also travel from mind to mind. Getting your organization to take a step back and look at how ops affects people (awareness of alert fatigue, burnout risk, proactive/reactive approaches) can be a tough challenge. In this talk, I will discuss how the very DNA of an organization can evolve through the use of actionable communications from all levels - management, strategy, and practitioners. The “virus” of humane ops will infect your organization, providing a more sustainable approach to on-call, incident resolution, post-mortems, and more. There also will be copious references to the Neal Stephenson classic novel, Snow Crash.