Prevent Emergent Failures
What you can’t see can take you down
A practical guide for critical infrastructure leaders on why emergent behaviors inside complex OT/ICS systems cause preventable failures — and how to surface them before they happen.
This free guide will help you:
- Understand why failures still surprise even experienced teams
- See where emergent risk actually lives — beyond dashboards and tools
- Learn why many “unknown unknowns” are predictable, just unexamined
- Gain a framework for exposing hidden interactions before they surface
From a former Navy professor, student of the creator of the Monterey Phoenix behavior modeling approach, and creator of Emergeneering™, the Monterey Phoenix-enabled methodology for emergent behavior analysis.
This guide is for leaders responsible for systems that cannot fail.
If you oversee critical infrastructure — energy, manufacturing, transportation, or other high- stakes operational environments — you already know these realities:
Thousands of interactions occur inside your systems every minute.
Most of them are invisible, undocumented, and never explicitly examined.
Monitoring tools and assessments are in place — yet surprises still happen.
Incidents often end with the same question: “How did we miss that?”
Even when controls are strong, there’s a quiet sense that something permitted by the design — something no one mapped — could align under the wrong conditions.
You’re not just protecting systems.
You’re protecting public trust, physical safety, essential services, and reputation.
WHY CURRENT APPROACHES KEEP FALLING SHORT
Most organizations are doing exactly what they were trained to do:
- monitor signals
- assess known risks
- analyze incidents after the fact
- strengthen controls once failures occur
And yet, preventable failures continue to surface.
That’s because emergent incidents don’t usually come from broken components.
They arise in the space between components — in interactions no one ever formalizes, models, or exhaustively explores.
These are the predictable-but-unpredicted behaviors — the ones that lead to reputation-damaging, front-page events and the “why didn’t we think of that?” moment.
THE GOOD NEWS: THESE RISKS DON’T HAVE TO STAY INVISIBLE
Emergent failures can be surfaced before they occur.
When teams externalize their decision logic, model real workflows, and examine the behaviors their systems permit, they gain something they’ve never had before:
FORESIGHT.
Not intuition.
Not hindsight.
Not another dashboard.
But a structured way to see:
- all possible behavior paths
- the conditions that trigger them
- where controls can prevent or contain them
This work reflects years of experience at the intersection of:
Critical systems
National security
System behavior modeling
Real-world operational risk
It comes from teaching, modeling, and facilitating discovery in environments where failure isn’t theoretical — and hindsight is too late.
If you’re responsible for preventing failures you can’t yet see — this guide is a practical place to start.
Free PDF · Designed for leaders responsible for complex, high-stakes systems