After leaving my CTO role at Etsy this past May, I took the summer off to spend time with my family, enjoy New York summertime, and give my mind time to refresh and recharge.

I thought long and hard about what I wanted to do next; the last time I took a new job was in 2009.

Since I had been an instigator in forming the SNAFUCatchers consortium (technical name: Resilient Business-Critical Software Operations) I helped put together the Stella Report. So, it may come as no surprise that I’m going to continue bridging the world of software engineering with cognitive systems engineering, human factors, systems safety, and resilience engineering.

Along with Dr. Richard Cook and Dr. David Woods, I’m launching a company we’re calling Adaptive Capacity Labs, and it’s focused on helping companies (via consulting and training) build their own capacity to go beyond the typical “template-driven” postmortem process and treat post-incident review as the powerful insight lens it can be.

I could not be more excited. Not only do I believe we can help businesses in real meaningful ways, I sincerely believe that doing this work is good for the industry as a whole. I also could not be happier to work alongside David and Richard.

It’s time we start taking human performance seriously.