Introduction

Most organizations have plenty of incidents. Very few have a reliable way to move the story of those incidents between levels of the company without dropping something important along the way.

Engineers see a rich, messy system failure. Middle managers see risk, tradeoffs, and staffing gaps. Executives see exposure, accountability, and strategy. By the time an outage story travels from the on-call engineer to the C‑suite, nuance has been stripped away, root causes simplified into slogans, and the real opportunities to learn have been cut to fit a slide.

This is where the analog incident freight elevator comes in.

Think of complex outage narratives as heavy cargo—dense, awkward, and easy to damage. You need a freight elevator, not a decorative glass lift, to move that cargo safely between floors of the organization. That elevator is your incident communication and knowledge-transfer system: the process, artifacts, and channels you use to move operational truth from front-line responders up to leadership and back down again.

In this post, we’ll explore how to design that elevator, how to keep it resilient (including analog backups), and how to use structured incident stories to build the shared cognitive maps that make your organization more reliable over time.

Why Incident Stories Get “Dropped” Between Floors

When incidents move between organizational levels, they usually pass through three kinds of distortion:

1. Compression – Details get stripped out to fit time constraints or perceived audience capacity.
2. Translation – Technical facts are converted into business language, often losing causal structure.
3. Moralization – Subtle system behaviors become simplified into “human error” or “bad decision” narratives.

The result is a “lightweight” version of the story that travels well politically, but poorly supports learning or prevention.

Reliability engineering approaches system performance as something to maintain and improve deliberately. By that logic, your incident communication is not an afterthought—it’s a critical asset. If you’d never accept silent data loss in your primary database, you shouldn’t accept silent context loss in your incident reports.

The Analog Freight Elevator Metaphor

Picture a freight elevator in an old building:

• It carries heavy loads safely: pallets, machinery, dense cargo.
• It has simple, robust controls—up, down, door, stop.
• It’s designed for reliability, not aesthetics.
• It often has manual overrides and analog interlocks that work even if the building’s fancy systems fail.

Your organization needs the equivalent for incident communication:

• A way to move heavy outage stories (rich, technical, multi-team) between engineers, management, and executives.
• A structure that protects critical context from being stripped away.
• A design that still works when your usual tooling—chat, ticketing, dashboards—goes down.

This isn’t about making every executive read a 30‑page postmortem. It’s about building a system where:

• The full story exists and is preserved.
• The right level of detail is reliably available at each floor.
• Important causal insights aren’t lost in translation.

Tailoring Depth Without Losing Truth

A frequent mistake is assuming executives can only handle a “non-technical” version of events. Many have engineering or technical backgrounds and can digest concise, precise technical context—as long as it’s well structured and clearly tied to business impact.

A useful pattern: keep the same skeleton of the story, but vary the muscle and skin for each audience.

For All Levels: Keep This Core Structure

Every version of the story should preserve:

1. Problem – What went wrong, and how did we know?
2. Impact – Who/what was affected, for how long, and how badly?
3. Actions – What we did during the incident.
4. Contributing Factors – Systems, processes, and conditions that shaped the outcome.
5. Follow-ups – What we’re doing to reduce recurrence or mitigate impact.

For Engineers: Deep Technical Context

• Detailed timelines with specific metrics, logs, and system behaviors.
• Architectural diagrams and failure mode analysis.
• Tradeoff discussions: what we tried, what failed, why we pivoted.
• Links to runbooks, code changes, and incident channels.

For Executives with Engineering Backgrounds: Concise but Rich

• Keep the Problem section technically honest: specific components, failure modes, and triggering conditions.
• Summarize Actions as sequences of tactical moves and decision points, not vague “the team fixed it.”
• Tie technical detail to risk categories they care about: single points of failure, dependency fragility, observability gaps, or staffing coverage.

For Non-Technical Stakeholders: Clean Interfaces

• Emphasize Impact, Customer Experience, and Recovery Time.
• Use causal language that preserves structure without jargon: “The system that matches orders to inventory became overloaded, which caused…”.
• Translate technical constraints into business constraints: “We had to choose between faster recovery with higher risk or slower, safer recovery; we chose slower and safer.”

The point: the same incident freight elevator can stop at different floors and open to different views, but the cargo inside is still the same story.

Treating Communication as a Reliability Asset

In reliability engineering, you:

• Identify critical components.
• Reduce their failure modes.
• Add redundancy where needed.
• Monitor and maintain them.

Apply that thinking to incident communication:

• Design clear paths for how incident information flows during and after events.
• Instrument the process: track who received which updates, when, and via what channel.
• Test it with drills; don’t find out your communication plan doesn’t work during a major outage.

If incident communication is ad hoc, personality-driven, and undocumented, you’ve built your organization on communication single points of failure—the one engineer who “knows how to explain things to leadership,” the one manager who always writes the postmortems.

Instead, make incident communication procedural, teachable, and inspectable.

When Digital Fails: Authenticated Analog Backups

Major incidents often attack the very systems you rely on for coordination:

• Chat platforms are down.
• Email is delayed or unavailable.
• Internal dashboards are unreachable.

If all your incident management is bound to those tools, you’re running an elevator that stops working during a power outage.

You need authenticated, analog backup channels:

• Radio systems with designated channels for incident coordination.
• Phone trees that are printed, tested, and periodically refreshed.
• Paper runbooks for the most critical recovery and communication steps.
• Physical whiteboards or printed forms for logging decisions and state.

“Authenticated” matters: you must be able to trust that the person on the other end is who they claim to be and that the information they provide is authoritative. That’s part process (call-back procedures, known contact numbers) and part culture (clear roles, no improvising critical announcements).

Your analog incident freight elevator should:

• Still move when the building’s smart systems fail.
• Have manual controls and overrides for when automation is unavailable.
• Be familiar enough that people can operate it under stress.

Prewritten Continuity Plans: Who Says What, to Whom, How

A good freight elevator has an operating manual. Your incident freight elevator needs one too.

Create continuity plans that answer in advance:

• Who is responsible for internal technical updates?
• Who owns updates to customers, partners, and regulators?
• What level of technical detail each audience should receive.
• Which channels to use in normal conditions (chat, email, status page) and in degraded conditions (phone, radio, in-person briefings).

Concretely, this might look like:

• A short communication runbook for major incidents:
  • Update cadence (e.g., every 30 minutes internally, every 60 minutes externally).
  • Required fields for each update (what changed since last update, current impact, next milestone).
  • Pre-agreed phrasing constraints to avoid blame, speculation, or premature root-cause claims.
• Named communication leads per shift or per team.
• Templates for executive briefings that engineers can fill in quickly.

The goal isn’t bureaucracy; it’s predictability. When everyone knows how the freight elevator operates, they can focus on the load, not the controls.

Shared Cognitive Maps: Learning from Heavy Outage Stories

Firefighters train not just on procedures, but on mental models of buildings, fire behavior, and human reactions under stress. These cognitive maps let them improvise effectively in novel situations.

Your teams need the same kind of shared cognitive maps for your systems and environments.

Structured Incident Stories as Training Material

Each major incident is a chance to build and refine those maps—if you capture and share the story well. Treat “heavy outage stories” as:

• Repeatable training scenarios for on-call engineers, new hires, and managers.
• Case studies that illuminate how your systems really fail, not just how they’re drawn.
• Shared references for discussions about tradeoffs, risk, and investment.

To make that work:

• Store incident reports in a searchable, curated repository with tags by system, symptom, and impact.
• Use them in regular drills: “Replay” key incidents as tabletop exercises.
• Encourage cross-team review so that infrastructure, product, and business stakeholders all build a common language around failure modes.

Over time, these stories become the freight that conditions your elevator: your people learn how to load, secure, and move complex context safely, and they recognize patterns earlier during live incidents.

Conclusion: Build the Elevator Before the Fire

You cannot improvise a reliable incident freight elevator in the middle of a big outage.

Design it now:

• Treat incident communication as a reliability asset, not administrative overhead.
• Preserve the full story while tailoring depth for each audience.
• Add analog, authenticated backup channels for when digital tools fail.
• Write and rehearse continuity plans so people know who says what, to whom, and how.
• Turn heavy outage stories into structured training material that builds shared cognitive maps.

When incidents hit, you want more than clever people and good tools. You want a system that moves hard-won operational insight up and down the organization without dropping context.

Build that analog incident freight elevator, keep it maintained, and your organization will not only survive its next outage—it will come out smarter, faster, and more resilient than before.