The Analog Incident Compass Porch

Sketching Paper Waypoints Before You Enter the War Room

In high‑stakes moments—major outages, product launches, PR crises—most teams rush straight into the war room. Screens light up, dashboards multiply, and people start firing off solutions before they’ve even agreed on what problem they’re solving.

That’s backwards.

Before you “go to war” with a plan, you need a porch.

The porch is the quiet, analog space before the war room: a place for sketching, note‑taking, and aligning mental models on paper and physical artifacts. It’s where you slow down just enough to think clearly—so that when you do speed up, you’re all running in the same direction.

This post explores how to build that Analog Incident Compass Porch using simple rituals: red‑yellow‑green dashboards, pre‑mortems, situation notes, physical maps, and plotters who maintain the shared picture as reality evolves.

Why You Need a Porch Before a War Room

Digital tools are amazing at capturing detail, but terrible at creating shared intuition under pressure. Tabs proliferate. Slack scrolls. Key information disappears into threaded noise.

An analog porch does three things:

1. Slows the thinking, not the response. Taking 15–30 minutes with paper and physical models sharpens what you’re actually responding to.
2. Builds a shared mental model. When people see the same map, color‑coded risks, and one‑page situation note, they talk about the same reality.
3. Reveals hidden assumptions. You can’t notice a missing step in a plan that only lives inside three people’s heads.

Borrow from safety‑critical fields—aviation, nuclear, industrial control systems—where people are trained not to trust their first, fastest story, but to stress‑test it on checklists, maps, and written summaries.

Simple Analog Rituals That Make Complexity Visible

You don’t need fancy tooling. Start with low‑tech, high‑signal habits.

1. Red–Yellow–Green Dashboards You Can Touch

Before a big incident response or critical decision, put a physical R/Y/G dashboard on the wall or table:

• Red – failing, actively breaking, or blocking
• Yellow – degraded, fragile, or uncertain
• Green – healthy, reliable, or confirmed

Use sticky notes or cards to represent systems, teams, vendors, or risks. Have people place or move them:

• “Is payments API red or yellow right now?”
• “Is customer sentiment green, or actually yellow trending red?”

Two benefits:

• Forces clarity: you can’t label everything “kind of bad” when you must pick a color.
• Surfaces disagreement: if two people would place the same card in different colors, you’ve just found a critical misalignment.

2. Pre‑Mortems and Post‑Failure Storytelling

Pre‑mortem (before action):

1. Assume the incident response or project failed badly.
2. Ask: “What most likely went wrong?”
3. Capture specific failure modes on paper.

This steals a trick from aviation and nuclear operations: proactively cataloging how things can fail so you aren’t surprised when one of them shows up.

Post‑failure storytelling (after action):

Instead of hunting for blame, write and tell a narrative:

“Here’s what we believed, what we tried, what actually happened, and what we learned.”

Normalize language like “We thought this would work, but it didn’t.” This makes it safe to admit uncertainty in both porch and war room. Psychological safety isn’t fluffy; it directly affects how fast you surface the uncomfortable truth.

Borrowing from Safety‑Critical Domains: Stress‑Test on Paper First

Industries where failure kills people (aviation, nuclear, automotive, industrial control) share a common instinct: rehearse disasters on paper before they happen in reality.

You can adapt their practices with a few simple evaluation dimensions whenever you’re crafting a strategy or incident plan:

• Single‑point of failure? What breaks if this one system/person fails?
• Fail‑safe vs. fail‑dangerous? If this plan partially fails, does it degrade safely or catastrophically?
• Detection latency. How long before we’d even notice this is going wrong?
• Escalation path. If X fails, who’s authorized to do Y, and how quickly?
• Reversibility. How hard is it to undo this decision if we’re wrong?

Run your plan through these lenses on paper before executing. Mark high‑risk areas directly on your map or situation note. This is your analog stress test—cheap, fast, and often enough to catch the most dangerous oversights.

The Situation Note: One Page to Align the Room

After every major discussion—especially right before war room activation—create a written situation note: a concise one‑pager that anyone can read in two minutes and say, “Now I get where we are.”

A solid situation note usually includes:

1. Facts (time‑stamped)
   • What is known, with sources.
   • What systems/regions/customers are affected.
2. Competing reports
   • “On‑call says latency is normal; logs show spike.”
   • “Customer success reports widespread complaints; monitoring still green.”
3. Visual (map or diagram)
   • Systems diagram, user flow, topology, or simple timeline.
4. Open questions
   • “Is the issue localized to EU traffic?”
   • “Do we know if data integrity is affected?”
5. Perception snapshot
   • Customers: calm, confused, or angry?
   • Media: unaware, tracking, or publishing?
   • Internal: aligned or fragmented?

Print this, put it on the table or wall, and update it as new information arrives. Digital copies can exist, but the physical version anchors the discussion.

Track Not Just Reality, But Perception

In modern incidents, the narrative is part of the incident:

• A minor technical issue can become a major crisis if communicated poorly.
• A serious outage can remain reputationally manageable with transparent, timely updates.

Explicitly track both:

• Operational state: What’s actually happening in systems and processes.
• Perceived state: How is this being experienced and described by customers, partners, regulators, media, and internal stakeholders?

On your porch board or situation note, add a simple perception panel:

• Customer sentiment: Green / Yellow / Red + one sentence.
• Media attention: Low / Emerging / High + examples.
• Stakeholder confidence: Stable / Wobbling / Breaking.

This keeps the war room from making technically correct decisions that are reputationally disastrous.

Make It Physical: Maps, Tokens, and Models on the Table

Digital whiteboards are useful, but they rarely trigger the same deep engagement as objects you can move with your hands.

Set up a table with:

• Maps or diagrams of systems, org charts, customer journeys, or supply chains.
• Printed data: key graphs, error rates, timelines, support volume.
• Tokens or models: cards, Lego pieces, coins—anything to represent assets, teams, customers, and risks.

Then, use them:

• Move a token to show a system going from green to red.
• Cluster risk cards around a critical dependency.
• Rearrange team tokens to experiment with different response roles.

This spatial representation does three things:

1. Externalizes the mental model. Instead of arguing abstractly, people can point: “This link here is what I’m worried about.”
2. Enables fast scenario testing. “What if this region goes down?” Move the token and see what cascades.
3. Keeps everyone on the same page. The physical layout is the shared picture; if someone’s imagination diverges, it’s visible.

The Plotter: Keeper of the Shared Picture

When incidents evolve quickly, the analog board can drift from reality unless someone owns it. Enter the plotter.

A plotter (or facilitator) is responsible for:

• Manipulating the physical models as information changes.
• Recording key decisions, state changes, and timings on the board and in the situation note.
• Calling out inconsistencies between what’s on the board and what people are saying.

The plotter doesn’t make decisions; they maintain coherence. This role is common in military and emergency operations centers, where map tables and status boards are continuously updated by dedicated staff.

In your context, plotters could be:

• Rotating facilitators from operations or program management.
• SREs or incident commanders trained specifically on analog mapping.

Their job is simple but vital: keep the porch (and later the war room) grounded in a single, accurate picture.

Normalize “We Thought This Would Work, But It Didn’t”

All of this will fail if people are afraid to admit they were wrong.

Make it normal to say:

• “We believed X; we tested it; we were wrong.”
• “Our mental model was incomplete. Here’s what we missed.”

You can bake this into rituals:

• Porch debriefs: After each major incident, review the porch artifacts. Ask, “Where did our assumptions diverge from reality?”
• Storytelling rounds: Encourage short, honest narratives from different roles—on‑call engineer, customer support, comms lead—without hunting for a villain.

Over time, teams learn that the porch is a learning zone, not a trial. That psychological safety is the foundation for faster, better decisions when the pressure spikes.

Putting It All Together

Before your next big incident or risky launch, try this sequence:

1. Gather in a physical space for 20–30 minutes before the war room kicks off.
2. Set up a red‑yellow‑green board for key systems, stakeholders, and perceptions.
3. Run a quick pre‑mortem: “Assume this response fails—why?”
4. Draft a one‑page situation note with facts, competing reports, visuals, and open questions.
5. Lay out maps, printed data, and tokens to represent systems, teams, and customers.
6. Assign a plotter to own the board and situation note as the single source of shared truth.
7. Explicitly track perception, not only technical state.
8. Afterward, hold a post‑failure storytelling session, even if everything went well—because something always almost didn’t.

The analog porch doesn’t slow you down; it removes the friction of confusion, misalignment, and unspoken assumptions. You walk into the war room with a compass, a map, and a shared story of what you’re facing.

When the stakes are high, that’s the edge that matters.