Moderator: Courtney Nash, The VOID
Panelists: Sarah Butt, Salesforce; Alex Elman, Slack; Eric Dobbs; Hamed Silatani, Uptime Labs
This hands-on session combines an interactive workshop with a unique panel of four experts, all from different companies and moderated by an industry expert, discussing an incident within a Staged World platform and its subsequent post-incident analysis. This unique approach offers unprecedented transparency and detail that typical software incidents don’t provide, including the rare opportunity to see exceptional incident response in action. Participants will review chat transcripts, videos of responders, and analyst notes, enabling a candid discussion free from legal or reputational concerns. As part of this, participants will encounter common challenges in incident management, such as the multi-party dilemma, managing saturation, and hidden work complexities. The subsequent panel discussion after the workshop session will cover effective teamwork, the nuances of expertise in high-pressure situations, the nature of surprises in incidents, and how to derive meaningful insights from complex events. Designed for incident responders, commanders, and SREs, this talk merges expertise from various fields to better inform how we respond to software incidents.
Courtney Nash is the Co-founder and CEO of The VOID. Her research focuses on system safety and failures in complex sociotechnical systems. An erstwhile cognitive neuroscientist, she has always been fascinated by how people learn, and the ways memory influences how they solve problems. Over the past two decades, she has held a variety of editorial, program management, research, and management roles at Verica, Holloway, Fastly, O’Reilly Media, Microsoft, and Amazon.
Sarah Butt is a Principal Engineer within Salesforce's Reliability Engineering group, where she helps lead Salesforce's Centralized Incident Response organization. She is fascinated by scale, complexity, systems thinking, and non-functional requirements— particularly those around reliability. You'll likely find her talking about topics such as resilience engineering, observability, and incident management and response. Prior to working at Salesforce, Sarah worked in both Dell and SentinelOne's SRE organizations. In her free time, Sarah enjoys freelancing as an audio engineer, competing as an equestrian, and spending time with her husband and their three labradors.
Alex Elman helps software organizations cope with ever increasing complexity and interconnectedness. His focus is on learning from incidents and incident management processes. Alex spent thirteen years at Indeed and was a founding member of their Site Reliability Engineering team. In 2024 Alex joined Slack and works in the reliability organization on incident management.
Eric Dobbs is helping bring resilience engineering and cognitive systems engineering into practice in the software industry. A self-taught programmer, he's been writing code recreationally for over four decades and professionally for three. He has also practiced aikido for over three decades and taught for two of those. His career has meandered through education, consultancies, government, non-profit, and businesses from startup size to Internet scale. He started deliberately practicing learning from incidents in 2018 as part of the SNAFUcatchers consortium. He holds a bachelor's degree in environmental design from the University of Colorado and a fifth-degree black belt from Boulder Aikikai.
Hamed Silatani is the Co-founder and CEO of Uptime Labs, a software engineer with over 20 years of experience supporting high-pressure financial trading platforms, and a resilience engineering enthusiast. Having managed major incidents under intense scrutiny, he learned that tools alone don’t create resilience—prepared teams do, and focuses on practical approaches to building confidence and incident readiness in engineering teams.
author = {Courtney Nash and Sarah Butt and Alex Elman and Eric Dobbs and Hamed Silatani},
title = {Using Staged World Exercises to Practice Effective Incident Response and Analysis Techniques},
year = {2026},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}