The Root Cause of Never Learning

May 26

In this episode of Root Cause we sit down with Adrian Hornsby — former AWS Principal Engineer, founder of Resilium Labs, and author of Why We Still Suck at Resilience — to get to the root cause of what's quietly breaking inside engineering organizations as AI absorbs more of the thinking. We dig into the gap between how we imagine our systems work and how they actually work, why that gap is where all the real learning lives, and what happens to a team when the thinking itself gets delegated to something that sounds confident but doesn't know which walls are load-bearing.

00:00 Pre-show Banter and the Dog

01:08 Introduction of the Episode and the Guest

05:00 What's Wrong with the Name of the Show

07:35 The Importance of Learning from Successes

09:53 Defining Work as Imagined and Work as Done

13:43 Leading vs Being Hands-On

28:49 Learning From the Gap

30:39 Chaos Engineering

31:31 Load Testing

32:50 Game Days

34:00 ORRs - Operational Readiness reviews

34:41 Learning From the Incident

36:25 How AI has Affected the Gap

41:57 Navigating the Complexity of AI Delegation

43:45 Skill Atrophy and the New Generation of Engineers

47:12 Building Tools That Keep You Smart

52:18 We Need a Crisis to Slow Down

58:30 Building Intuition in AI-Driven Systems

01:03:17 The Human Touch in Technology

01:07:32 Facing Fears and Embracing Change

01:16:28 Question for the Next Guest and Closing

Adrian has generously decided to run a discount with the promocode “rootcausebynune” - for the first 30 copies you can buy his book for as low as 14.99 - that’s over 70% discount over the suggested price!

https://leanpub.com/whywestillsuckatresilience/c/rootcausebynune

Find Adrian at: