Episode Guest · Contributing Author

Marina Nitze

Co-founder, Layer Aleph · Former CTO, U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs · Co-author, Crisis Engineering & Hack Your Bureaucracy

Marina Nitze became CTO of the VA—the largest civilian agency in the US—in 2013, arriving as part of the rescue operation for HealthCare.gov and helping stand up the U.S. Digital Service. Since leaving government, she has co-founded Layer Aleph, a crisis engineering firm that works inside healthcare systems, financial institutions, and state governments. Her work is built on a single premise: crisis is a mechanism for change that ordinary times cannot produce, and the organizations that understand this—and prepare—are the ones that come out different.

On Invisible Machines

1 episode

S7 Ep. 7 · Invisible Machines

Crisis Is Your Opening

Most organizations treat crisis as a failure state. Marina Nitze treats it as a window. The five indicators that distinguish a useful crisis from chronic dysfunction—and the toolkit for standing up a crisis engineering center in hours, not weeks.

◆ Open the ideation

Contributions to UXM

2 pieces

Book Excerpt · Crisis Engineering

The Crisis Worth Using

The five indicators of a genuinely useful crisis—and the difference between the kind that opens a window for transformational change and the kind that merely accelerates collapse. Excerpted from Crisis Engineering.

7 min read April 2025 ◆ The Useful Crisis

Guest Article

When the Window Opens: A Field Guide to Crisis Seizing

Written for UXM as a companion to the episode. Not theory—what Marina actually does when she walks into a failing system with a 90-day mandate and no authority to hire. Practical, specific, and unsettling in the best way.

11 min read April 2025 ◆ The Useful Crisis

Ideations

1 cluster

The Useful Crisis

S7 Ep. 4 · 7 pieces · April 2025