In this week's episode, O'Reilly's Mac Slocum sits down with Richard Cook and David Woods. Cook is a physician, researcher, and educator, who is currently a research scientist in the Department of Integrated Systems Engineering at Ohio State University, and emeritus professor of health care systems safety at Sweden’s KTH. Woods also is a professor at Ohio State University and is leading the Initiative on Complexity in Natural, Social, and Engineered Systems, and he's the co-director of Ohio State University’s Cognitive Systems Engineering Laboratory. They chat about SNAFU Catchers; anomaly response; and the importance of not only understanding how things fail, but how things normally work.

Richard Cook and David Woods on Successful Anomaly Response

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.

Richard Cook and David Woods on Successful Anomaly Response

O'Reilly Radar