This is Fine! A podcast about resilience engineering and software Building and Revising Adaptive Capacity Sharing for Technical Incident Response with Beth Adele Long
Feb 26, 2026
Beth Adele Long, Principal at Adaptive Capacity Labs and resilience practitioner, shares field-tested practices from New Relic. She describes the NERF rotation, incident command vs support roles, and how calm coordinators reduce org-wide disruption. Conversation covers lowering friction to ask for help, making operational work a career path, and using management and tools to sustain adaptive capacity.
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How New Relic's NERF Started
- Beth described how New Relic's volunteer NERF (New Relic Emergency Response Force) formed after senior SREs repeatedly improved major incidents by calming and coordinating responders.
- The NERF rotation paged senior volunteers into long or severe incidents to stabilize chaos, not just to provide technical fixes.
Coordination Beats Pure Technical Skill In Crises
- NERFs primarily provided calm coordination and cross-organizational context rather than deep technical fixes during high-severity incidents.
- Their value came from stabilizing people, knowing who to call, and connecting disparate teams so responders could focus on technical work.
Make Incident Playbooks Readable Under Panic
- Design incident documentation for users under adrenaline: make a short, obvious "get help" top line and minimal actionable steps.
- Beth replaced an overwhelming manual with a one‑pager and Hitchhiker's Guide 'don't panic' UI to lower barriers to asking for help.