Show Notes
In this episode with return guest David Leigh, we explore one of the most important pillars of Season 3: how learning transforms systems—and more specifically, how resilience is built not through tools or processes alone, but through the interplay of diverse perspectives, psychological safety, and evolving mental models.
What begins with a playful callback to David’s earlier storytelling episode quickly becomes a deep and wide‑ranging conversation about:
Why resilience is fundamentally about preparing for the unexpected
How mental models age, erode, and become outdated—and why acknowledging that is a strength
The power of diverse representation in incident response
Why psychological safety is the foundation for resilient socio‑technical systems
How practices like pre‑mortems and tabletop exercises build cultural readiness
The limitations of automation, metrics, and “preventing recurrence” mindsets
And why learning is not simply knowledge acquisition, but a force that shapes systems themselves
David shared stories, examples, and insights that apply equally to engineering teams, organizations, and society.
More from Making of the SRE Omelette
In this unique episode, we sit down with Dr. Jane Goodyer, Dean of the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University and a global leader in reimagining engineering education. From her inspiring personal journey to pioneering Canada’s first fully work-integrated digital technologies degree, Jane shares how academia and industry can collaborate to prepare graduates for the ever-changing world of work.
Season 3 of Making of the SRE Omelette is here - and it’s all about resilience.
The conclusion of the two part crossover podcast series explores the intersection of AI with sustainable IT operations featuring Jerry Cuomo from The Art of AI and Kevin Yu from Making of the SRE Omelette. The discussion delves into practical measures for more efficient energy use in AI systems, emphasizing the need for data and the analysis of past behavior to inform energy-efficient decision-making. Jerry and Kevin highlight the importance of balancing AI and human inputs to achieve meaningful tasks and improve overall quality of products. Discuss challenges such as right-sizing compute and recognize the pivotal role of data in addressing these issues, advocating for a data-driven approach to answer critical questions and provide necessary context for decision-making.
Mike Hollinger, Master Inventor, CTO for Applied AI & Distinguished Engineer for Maximo Application Suite talks about how we can leverage operational insights from assets, facilities and infrastructure to drive clean energy transition and decarbonization. Mike shares stories from customers that showcases successes as well as challenges they faced. Mike have a call to action to inspire Site Reliability Engineers to embrace the data and capabilities we have at our fingertips today to turn data into action to achieve the sustainable future.
Have you struggled to convince others of your idea? Be it to tackle a reliability problem or a sustainability challenge. In this episode, I have a conversation with Danny Fontaine - host of the Podcast Pitch Master on how to pitch SRE and Sustainability ideas.