Our new book, Crisis Engineering, is about what actually happens when systems break under pressure and how to fix them.

It comes out April 7, 2026, everywhere books are sold, as a paperback, and audiobook (read by Cassandra Campbell).

For bulk orders below 500 copies, purchase on BulkBooks. For bulk orders over 500 copies, please contact marina@layeraleph.com.

This post is the first of a three-post series on the signals and shock of crisis, alongside the opportunities for response and renewal they unlock.

Parts two and three of this series will cover other useful indicators of crisis, and how to use them.

Fundamental Surprise, and Failure of Sensemaking

Crisis Indicator: Fundamental Surprise

Any organization's information-gathering, decision-making, and operational practices will work under most circumstances experienced in the past. John Gall, in his essential work, The Systems Bible, pithily captures this wisdom as: "THE ARMY IS NOW FULLY PREPARED TO FIGHT THE PREVIOUS WAR."

A fundamental surprise^[1] is an event or circumstance that violates underlying assumptions of an organization's consensus reality. Consensus reality is the current belief of how things work, what is happening, how we are related to the people and systems around us, and why we are here.

Many examples of fundamental surprise come from the military and intelligence spheres. One from our own experience is: "You are the Department of Health and Human Services, the second-largest federal agency in the United States, largely in the business of calculating and sending checks to citizens, doctors, and hospitals. Legislation orders you to build an online health insurance marketplace—something you have never done before."

How to use it

Fundamental surprise unlocks an opportunity to discover and incorporate new facts about reality, to gather information that—while at odds with a broken historical understanding—reflects what is actually happening. Used wisely in a crisis engineering effort, even one or two previously inconceivable facts combined with a few more crisis indicators, are sufficient to permanently transform any organization's operating model, and understanding, in a matter of days.

Crisis Indicator: Failure of Sensemaking

During "business as usual," all organizations operate under some amount of self-delusion. A reliable indicator of crisis is those illusions becoming unsustainable.

Information-gathering breaks down, information flow becomes unintelligible, or the rate of change becomes so fast that information is useless by the time it arrives^[2]. Critical sensory information like feelings, intuition, and context can disappear from operations or decision-making as the gap between understanding and reality grows wide enough.

An example from recent history is Air France flight 447. At the time the aircraft entered a stall which ended in the Atlantic ocean, killing everyone aboard, both pilots had entirely different understandings of what was happening and their relationships to it. Sensemaking is a social process, and theirs had broken down to the point of them each providing opposite inputs to the flight stick of the aircraft.

How to use it

A failure of sensemaking unlocks an opportunity to re-establish sensemaking in a way that makes for a new, more accurate consensus reality. Given an understanding of how sensemaking happens in a complex system, a team can create the conditions for a more useful story to emerge which gives everyone an understanding of what is happening and how they relate to it. A crisis engineering effort can do this durably, while drastically increasing the tempo of action, in an organization of any size. This act is otherwise impossible even on timelines measured in months or years.