The Analog Incident Gallery Wall: Curating Hand‑Drawn Failure Portraits for Weekly Reliability Reviews

If your weekly reliability review is just a screen share of dashboards and a rushed recap of “what went wrong,” you’re leaving massive learning value on the table.

Imagine instead: a physical wall (yes, analog) covered with hand‑drawn “failure portraits” — each one a visual story of an incident. Around every sketch are notes about what we learned, what we changed, and what’s still uncertain. Teams walk up to this wall before their weekly review, connect patterns across incidents, and update the drawings as their understanding deepens.

This is the Analog Incident Gallery Wall: a living artifact of your system’s scars, decisions, and lessons. When paired with structured post‑incident review (PIR) practices and solid reporting, it becomes a powerful tool to build reliability culture, not just fix last week’s outage.

In this post, we’ll explore how to:

• Use structured PIR plans and templates to make weekly reviews consistent and repeatable
• Turn every incident into shared, actionable learning (instead of knowledge buried in chat logs)
• Leverage automatically generated, customizable reports to spot trends and systemic issues
• Visualize uncertainty and contributing factors to better understand risk
• Align reviews with frameworks like the NIST Incident Response Guide for stronger security and resilience
• Treat the gallery of incidents as a living learning artifact that your team actually uses

Why an Analog Gallery Wall in a Digital World?

Digital tools are great at storing information; they’re not always great at making teams pay attention to it.

A physical wall of incidents works because it:

• Interrupts autopilot – You can’t scroll past it. It’s there in the hallway, in the war room, in the team space.
• Invites conversation – People point at it, ask questions, and add sticky notes.
• Makes history visible – New team members immediately see what “real incidents” look like, not just what the runbook says.
• Reinforces culture – It normalizes talking about failure, uncertainty, and trade‑offs.

The key is to connect this analog artifact back to structured, repeatable incident practices — not to replace them with ad‑hoc doodles.

Step 1: Start with Structured PIR Plans and Templates

The gallery wall only works if each incident is documented in a consistent, comparable way.

Create a Post‑Incident Review (PIR) template that you use for every incident, no matter how small. At minimum, include:

1. Summary

   • What happened?
   • Who was affected?
   • When did it start and end?

2. Impact

   • User impact (e.g., latency, errors, data risk)
   • Business impact (e.g., revenue, SLAs, reputation)

3. Timeline

   • Key events from detection to resolution
   • Decisions made and why

4. Contributing factors & conditions

   • Technical factors (bugs, misconfigurations, capacity limits)
   • Organizational factors (handoffs, on‑call rotations, unclear ownership)

5. Detection & response

   • How was it detected?
   • What made it harder or easier to resolve?

6. Learnings & actions

   • What did we learn that we didn’t know before?
   • Follow‑up tasks, owners, and deadlines

Use this same structure in every PIR. Over time, this consistency will make patterns stand out — when you’re reviewing reports, and when you’re creating failure portraits for the gallery wall.

Step 2: Turn Incidents into Shared, Actionable Learning

Most incident knowledge gets trapped:

• In long Slack threads
• In meeting recordings that no one revisits
• In siloed docs that only one team knows about

Your goal is to convert every incident into learning the whole org can access and act on.

Practical ways to do that:

• Hold structured PIR meetings within a fixed time after resolution (e.g., 48–72 hours).
• Invite cross‑functional roles: SREs, developers, security, support, product owners.
• Focus on “how did this make sense at the time?” instead of “who messed up?”
• Summarize in plain language: create a short, non‑blaming narrative everyone can understand.

Then, distill each PIR into a single-page visual that becomes the “failure portrait” on your gallery wall.

Step 3: Create Hand‑Drawn Failure Portraits

The “portrait” isn’t art therapy; it’s a visual index to the deeper PIR.

For each incident, sketch a one‑page poster that includes:

• A memorable title – “The Tuesday Cache Cascade” or “The Phantom 500s”
• A simple diagram of the incident flow – Requests, services, queues, DBs, external APIs
• Key contributing factors – Configuration drift, missing alert, under‑provisioned service
• Impact snapshot – Rough magnitude, affected users or systems
• Three most important learnings – Short bullet points
• Links or QR codes – Pointing to the full PIR, logs, or dashboards

Deliberately keep it hand‑drawn and low‑fidelity:

• It lowers the barrier to contribution. Anyone can pick up a marker and improve it.
• It conveys “this is a working understanding,” not a perfect, static truth.

Put these portraits up on a shared wall in a space your teams actually use. For distributed teams, you can mirror this with a virtual gallery (e.g., Miro, FigJam) but try to retain the sketch‑like, analog feel.

Step 4: Use Automatically Generated, Customizable PIR Reports

Hand‑drawn portraits are not a replacement for real post‑incident data. They sit on top of it.

Use tooling that can automatically generate baseline PIR reports, then customize them during review. Done well, this helps you:

• Spot trends – e.g., “40% of incidents in the last quarter involved deployment rollbacks.”
• Surface recurring patterns – alert fatigue, missing runbooks, specific services that repeatedly fail.
• Identify systemic reliability issues – architectural chokepoints, under‑invested components, or weak access controls.

Your weekly reliability review should include a segment where you:

• Review the last week’s incidents using standardized reports
• Look at rolling trend views (4–12 weeks) to contextualize this week against history
• Decide which incidents are “gallery‑worthy” — typically those that:
  • Taught you something new about your system
  • Involved complex socio‑technical factors
  • Exposed systemic weaknesses, not just transient hiccups

Every chosen incident gets both a formal PIR record and a visual portrait.

Step 5: Visualize Uncertainty and Contributing Factors

Most incident reviews stop at “root cause.” Reality is rarely that clean.

Your gallery wall is a chance to visualize uncertainty and multiple contributing factors, which supports better risk understanding and remediation.

On each portrait, explicitly mark:

• Known contributing factors – solid lines, check marks, or confident labels
• Suspected or uncertain factors – dotted lines, question marks, color coding
• Contextual conditions – high load, holiday traffic, partial outage in a dependency, staff changes

This does two important things:

1. Normalizes uncertainty – It’s okay not to know everything; the goal is to keep learning.
2. Guides better remediation – You can distinguish between “we know we must fix this” and “we should investigate this further.”

During weekly reviews, use this visual language to drive discussion:

• Where do we keep seeing the same uncertain factors reappear?
• Are we repeatedly accepting certain risks without better measurement or controls?

This directly supports more realistic risk management conversations.

Step 6: Align with Established Frameworks (e.g., NIST)

Ad‑hoc practices don’t scale well when stakes are high. Aligning your incident review process with established frameworks strengthens your security posture and operational resilience.

The NIST Incident Response Guide (NIST SP 800‑61) outlines phases like:

1. Preparation
2. Detection & Analysis
3. Containment, Eradication & Recovery
4. Post‑Incident Activity

You can map your PIR template and gallery practices directly to these phases:

• Timeline & detection details → Detection & Analysis
• Containment/recovery steps → Containment, Eradication & Recovery
• Learnings, systemic actions, and policy updates → Post‑Incident Activity

By referencing NIST (or similar frameworks) in your PIR templates and weekly reviews, you:

• Show auditors and stakeholders that your process is intentional and standards‑aligned
• Ensure that security‑relevant incidents receive the same rigorous treatment as reliability issues
• Build a shared vocabulary between SRE, security, and operations teams

Your analog gallery then becomes a visible map of how these frameworks show up in real incidents, not just in policy docs.

Step 7: Treat the Gallery as a Living Learning Artifact

The gallery wall is not a museum of past failures; it’s a working tool.

Make it part of your regular rituals:

• Weekly reliability review

  • Start at the wall: recap new portraits, update old ones if your understanding changed.
  • Ask: What new patterns are emerging across the wall?

• Onboarding

  • Walk new engineers through 3–5 representative incidents.
  • Show how the organization responded, learned, and changed.

• Quarterly planning

  • Use the gallery to argue for investments:
    • “These 6 incidents all involve this service and this dependency.”
    • “We keep underestimating this kind of risk; we need better observability here.”

• Cultural reinforcement

  • Celebrate good detection, clear communication, and thoughtful learning — not just fast fixes.
  • Highlight when a past portrait directly helped resolve a new incident.

When teams see that incidents lead to visible learning and concrete change, they’re more willing to:

• Report issues early
• Participate actively in PIRs
• Be honest about uncertainty and trade‑offs

That’s how you build a reliability culture, not just an incident queue.

Bringing It All Together

The Analog Incident Gallery Wall is a simple idea:

• Capture every significant incident using structured PIR templates.
• Convert those PIRs into hand‑drawn failure portraits that visualize impact, contributing factors, and uncertainty.
• Use automated, customizable reporting to spot trends and systemic issues across incidents.
• Align your reviews with frameworks like the NIST Incident Response Guide to strengthen security and resilience.
• Treat the gallery as a living artifact, integrated into weekly reviews, onboarding, and strategic planning.

You don’t need fancy tools to start. You need:

• A consistent PIR template
• A whiteboard or wall
• Markers, sticky notes, and a willingness to draw imperfect diagrams

From there, your incident history stops being scattered across chats and documents — and becomes a shared, evolving map of how your systems really behave under stress.

That map, revisited every week, is one of the most powerful reliability tools you can have.