The Outage You Remember vs. The Outage You Wrote Down

Think back to the last major incident your team had.

What you remember probably isn’t just:

• A timeline of events
• A list of impacted services
• A bullet point explaining root cause

You remember:

• The silence on the call right after someone said, “I think I just made it worse.”
• The frantic pinging of the one person who “always knows this part of the system.”
• The awkward moment when two senior engineers argued about whether to roll back.
• The Slack thread where someone quietly posted, “I need a 5‑minute break.”

None of that shows up in a typical post-incident report.

This is where the idea of an Analog Incident Story Cabinet of Echoes comes in.

It’s a way of treating incidents not just as technical failures, but as stories worth preserving—complete with voices, emotions, misunderstandings, and the very human experience of trying to keep a complex system alive under pressure.

What Is an "Analog Incident Story Cabinet of Echoes"?

The name sounds whimsical, but the idea is concrete:

A Cabinet of Echoes is a curated collection of rich, narrative incident stories that preserve how outages actually sounded and felt inside the team.

Instead of archiving only:

• timelines,
• metrics, and
• root cause bullets,

…you also preserve:

• Excerpts from Slack, Zoom, or Teams chats (with light anonymization if necessary)
• Key quotes from participants (“In that moment, I thought the database was gone for good.”)
• Audio snippets or transcripts from the incident call
• Short narrative reflections from people involved (“From my side, it felt like…”)
• Emotional context (when stress peaked, when relief set in)

It’s "analog" in the sense that it focuses on subjective, lived experience—the messy, narrative side of reality—rather than clean, digital abstractions.

You’re not just storing data; you’re storing echoes of the incident as it was lived.

Why Traditional Incident Reports Feel So Sterile

Most incident reviews are built to answer two questions:

1. What happened?
2. How do we make sure it never happens again?

Those are good questions—but they push us toward a narrow framing:

• We flatten the incident into ordered events (“At 10:03, alert fired…”)
• We reduce complex dynamics into single causes (“Misconfigured flag in service X…”)
• We strip away emotions and uncertainty (“We weren’t sure if it was the DB or the cache, and that uncertainty cost us 20 minutes.”)

The result: a clean artifact that’s easy to read, but hard to truly learn from.

Most post-incident documents don’t tell you:

• How confusing the dashboards were under pressure
• How unclear the escalation path felt in the moment
• How junior engineers hesitated to speak up
• How tools, alerts, and social dynamics reinforced or undermined each other

These are sociotechnical factors—the interactions between people, tools, culture, processes, and power. Incidents live in this sociotechnical space, not just in logs and code.

A Cabinet of Echoes is designed to preserve that reality.

Capturing the Sociotechnical Reality of Outages

When you treat incidents as narrative events instead of just technical puzzles, different details become visible:

• Stress: Who was overwhelmed? Who took on too much? When did cognitive overload show up?
• Assumptions: What did people assume was true (“the deploy already finished”) that turned out to be wrong?
• Communication breakdowns: Where did messages fail to reach the right person or channel?
• Power dynamics: Who felt safe speaking up? Who didn’t? Who defaulted into decision-maker mode and how did that shape the outcome?
• Tool friction: Which dashboards, runbooks, or alerts actually helped—and which confused or misled people?

These aren’t side-notes. Under real incident pressure, these human and organizational dynamics are as decisive as the code path that failed.

By preserving “how it sounded” as well as “what happened,” your Cabinet gives future teams access to:

• The texture of the incident, not just the structure
• The emotional landscape that shaped decisions
• The work as done, not just the work as imagined in diagrams and runbooks

This becomes a shared, cross-generational memory for your engineering organization.

What Lives in a Cabinet of Echoes?

You don’t need a fancy platform to get started. You need intentionality.

A Cabinet of Echoes could simply be a folder in your knowledge base with a consistent structure, for example:

1. Story Overview

• Short narrative summary (3–5 paragraphs) in plain language
• Who was involved
• What was at stake (user impact, business impact, emotional impact)

2. Voices & Moments

• Selected chat excerpts or quotes, with context
• Annotated screenshots of chat threads (“This was the moment we realized rollback failed”)
• Transcribed snippets from the call (with timestamps)

3. Emotional Timeline

• Rough phases of the incident (e.g., Confusion → Panic → Focus → Relief → Post-mortem fatigue)
• Short reflections from people in each phase

4. Sociotechnical Notes

• How tools, alerts, and dashboards helped or hurt
• Evidence of role confusion, unclear ownership, or decision bottlenecks
• Where culture, norms, or power made things easier or harder

5. Reflections, Not Just Action Items

• What surprised people
• What they’d do differently next time emotionally or socially, not just technically
• Any metaphor that emerged (“It felt like trying to debug through a keyhole”)

These artifacts don’t replace your technical post-incident review. They sit alongside it, adding the missing human channel.

How This Changes Learning, Empathy, and Culture

Over time, a Cabinet of Echoes becomes:

• A training library for new on-call engineers: they don’t just read what broke, they experience how real incidents feel.
• An empathy engine for leadership: they hear the cognitive and emotional load of incidents, not just the incident count.
• A mirror for your culture: you can see patterns in how people speak, hesitate, escalate, blame, or support each other under pressure.

Instead of “We had 12 sev‑1s this quarter,” you start to see:

• Where stress consistently spikes and why
• Which teams feel chronically exposed
• Where decision-making is fragile or over-centralized
• Where your tools are silently training people into unsafe habits

This can influence decisions far beyond incident management:

• How you staff teams and rotations
• How you support psychological safety
• How you talk about “human error” versus system conditions

Why This Matters for AI and Automation

Many teams are rushing to add AI into incident response:

• AI copilots for on-call
• Automated runbook execution
• LLM-powered summaries after the fact

These tools need training data. If your only artifacts are:

• sanitized timelines
• cleaned-up bullet points

…then your AI will learn an unreal version of how incidents actually work.

Narrative incident stories give AI systems:

• Real examples of ambiguity in language (“db is down” might mean several different things)
• Evidence of conflicting interpretations (“I thought you meant the staging cluster”)
• A window into how operators actually use tools versus how tools were designed

This leads to better AI design:

• Smarter suggestions that reflect real decision points
• More realistic expectations of human attention and capacity
• Automation that augments instead of overriding human judgment

Your Cabinet of Echoes becomes ground truth for sociotechnical reality—vital when you’re handing more responsibility to automated systems.

Making an Analog Cabinet a Practical Habit

You don’t need to overhaul your entire incident process. Start small:

1. Add a “Story Capture” step to your incident checklist

   • After resolution (or during the debrief), assign someone as story curator.

2. Gather raw material quickly

   • Export relevant Slack channels or chat logs.
   • Mark time ranges on the call recording.
   • Ask each participant to write 3–5 sentences: “From my perspective, it felt like…”

3. Curate, don’t transcribe everything

   • Select a few representative quotes and moments.
   • Annotate with short explanations and timestamps.

4. Store it next to the technical post-incident doc

   • Same folder or index, clearly labeled as “Story Version” or “Echoes.”

5. Use it in education and reviews

   • When onboarding, walk new hires through an incident by playing clips or reading excerpts.
   • In leadership reviews, use quotes to ground metrics in lived experience.

With repetition, this becomes part of your normal incident hygiene: we fix the system, we understand the system, and we remember how it felt to operate the system.

Conclusion: Designing for Memory, Not Just Metrics

Incidents are not just failures in code; they are events in a living, breathing sociotechnical system.

The Analog Incident Story Cabinet of Echoes is a simple but powerful idea:

• Preserve how outages sound, feel, and unfold for the people doing the work.
• Treat narrative, emotion, and confusion as first-class data, not noise.
• Build an organizational memory that future teams can learn from—one that goes beyond root causes into real human experience.

Metrics and logs tell you where the system broke.
A Cabinet of Echoes tells you how people carried the system through the breaking.

You need both if you want incident management that is not only more effective, but more humane—and if you want your tools, automation, and AI to be grounded in the reality of how work actually gets done.