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 experienced teams after the specified work is done
- See where emergent risk actually lives — in behavior the system still permits, beyond dashboards and tools
- Learn why many “unknowns” are knowable
- Gain a way to surface hidden interactions before they show up in operation
The guide was created by Dr. Kristin Giammarco, a former U.S. Navy professor, student of the creator of the Monterey Phoenix (MP)–behavior modeling approach, and creator of Emergeneering™ — the MP-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 comprehensively examined.
Monitoring tools and assessments are in place — yet surprises still happen.
Incidents often end with the same question: “Why didn’t we think of 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 reputations.
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 combinations never considered together, interactions no one ever formalized, modeled, or explored. These are the knowable unknowns — 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
They gain a structured way to see
- all possible behavior paths in scope
- the conditions that trigger them
- where controls can prevent or contain them
At Firelight Logic, our work reflects years of experience at the intersection of
Critical systems
National security
System behavior modeling
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