Crisis Engineering Time-Tested Tools for Turning Chaos into Clarity

by Nitze, Marina; Weaver, Matthew; Dickerson, Mikey

• ISBN13: 9780306836862
• ISBN10: 0306836866
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780306836879
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2026-04-07
• Publisher: Balance
• More Book Details

Summary

Learn how to successfully emerge from complex crisis conditions with this practical, comprehensive guide.
 
"A book I wish I’d had in difficult times.” —General Stanley McChrystal, US Army (Ret) & Co-Founder and CEO, McChrystal Group
 
When the system breaks, what do you do? You're in the middle of a meltdown. The platform is down, the phones are ringing, the headlines are brutal, and your team is looking to you for answers. The usual playbooks—careful planning, expert consultation, bold strategy—aren’t working. What if we told you that instead of the end of the world, this is your moment to create lasting, transformative change?     
 
Crisis Engineering is your field guide to leading through the chaos—and coming out stronger than before. Drawing on decades of experience inside some of the most complex systems in industry and government, Marina Nitze, Matthew Weaver, and Mikey Dickerson, of the crisis engineering firm Layer Aleph, reveal their powerful, hands-on framework for navigating high-stakes crises.
From the rescue of HealthCare.gov to wildfire response and pandemic logistics, this book offers real-world stories, practical tools, and hard-won insights into how complex systems fail—and how to help them recover. You’ll learn:

• How to identify the 5 signals of a crisis—and use them to your advantage
• Why traditional leadership instincts fail under pressure—and what to do instead
• How to stand up your own crisis engineering effort when it matters most

Whether you’re in tech, government, healthcare, or any other critical system, Crisis Engineering gives you the mindset, tools, and vocabulary to lead with clarity and create lasting change.
 

Author Biography

Marina Nitze is a partner in the crisis engineering firm Layer Aleph and co-author of HACK YOUR BUREAUCRACY. In addition to Layer Aleph, Marina is a fellow at New America's New Practice Lab, where she works on improving America's foster care system; her efforts have unlocked over $3B in cash payments each year to kin caregivers living below the poverty line, while eliminating significant administrative burden. Marina was the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs under President Obama, after serving as a Senior Advisor on technology in the Obama White House and as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the U.S. Department of Education. She lives in Seattle, WA.
 
Mikey Dickerson led the HealthCare.gov rescue, for which he was featured on the cover of TIME magazine. Afterwards, President Obama appointed him Deputy Chief Information Officer of the United States. Part of this involved Mikey’s work establishing the United States Digital Service (USDS) to bring America’s top technologists into government and solve its hardest and most pressing IT challenges.  ikey lives in Arizona.

Matthew Weaver was a founding member of the "SRE" discipline which now dominates technical operations worldwide, establishing SRE practices during his tenure leading global responsibility for the availability and continuity of Google's search product in 2005-2009. He also spent several years at Fastly, improving the safety, performance, and resilience of the infrastructure – enabling them to handle the 800+ billion network requests they receive each day. He lives in rural Wisconsin.