Crisis Engineering: Time-Tested Tools for Turning Chaos into Clarity
- Author: Marina Nitze, Matthew Weaver, Mikey Dickerson
- Page count: 317
- Started on: 2026/09/02
- Finished on: 2026/09/13
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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Crisis engineering is the practice of navigating high-stakes crises, understanding why complex systems fail, restoring shared clarity, and using disruption as an opportunity for lasting improvement. The book is written by a former government CTO and two former Google SREs1, who are now partners at a company that specializes in crisis engineering.
The book first covers two well-known crises in detail: the partial nuclear meltdown in Three Mile Island, and the problems launching HealthCare.gov (whose rescue Mikey led). It then explains the crisis-engineering toolkit, which centers on sensemaking: getting everyone to see the same picture of what’s happening, so that they can start addressing problems together. It then ends with a practical example where they used the crisis-engineering toolkit: helping fix California’s unemployment-benefits system during early COVID.
I found the book a relatively easy read, especially given its potentially complex subject matter. The authors did a great job bookending with some big examples, and sprinkling the more-theoretical middle part with shorter examples too. I still found the middle part the driest, probably because I haven’t been dealing with any such crisis recently. It was also fun to recognize many of the practices from working with SREs and on difficult projects during my time at Google.
Footnotes
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Site Reliability Engineers are the folks who ensure that Google’s services stay running. Since these are highly complex systems, many of the techniques they use in crisis engineering were developed or refined in that role. ↩
