The Analog Incident Story Cabinet: Plotting Outage Narratives Like a Writers’ Room

Every engineering team has its war stories: the 3 a.m. pager alerts, the cascading failures, the “how did that even happen?” bugs. Most of the time, those stories live in half-finished documents, scattered chat logs, or in the heads of the people who were there.

But what if you treated these incidents like episodes in an ongoing series? What if your outage reviews felt more like a writers’ room for a prestige TV show—where structure, character arcs, and themes all work together to tell a powerful story about how your system and your team actually work?

Welcome to the Analog Incident Story Cabinet: a way of thinking about incidents as narratives you deliberately craft, curate, and revisit to build a shared understanding of your complex systems and your own growth as a team.

Why Storytelling Belongs in Engineering

Storytelling workshops might sound like something for marketing or product teams, not SREs or platform engineers. But in high-performing technical teams, storytelling is a core learning and alignment tool.

Used well, a storytelling workshop can help you:

Reflect on achievements: Not just what broke, but what you fixed, where you showed good judgment, where you improved.
Learn from others’ experiences: Make tacit knowledge visible—especially from incidents only a few people lived through.
Strengthen team connections: Sharing stressful moments in a structured, supportive way builds psychological safety.

When you design a storytelling workshop around incidents and outages, you make the power of teamwork visible. You also turn your incident reviews from dry, compliance-driven tasks into shared narratives that people actually care to read—and remember.

Blameless Post‑Mortems as Story Skeletons

Blameless post-mortems are already a kind of storytelling. They:

Reconstruct a timeline
Identify root causes and contributing factors
Document impact and remediation
Share lessons learned

But too often, they end up as chronological logs with a moral: here’s what happened, here’s what went wrong, here’s what we’ll do better.

To get more value, treat your blameless post-mortem as the skeleton of a story, not the finished narrative. The story isn’t “someone made a mistake” or “this component failed.” The story is how a complex system plus a group of humans interacted under pressure—and what changed because of it.

A useful mental shift:

The incident is not a single event; it’s an episode in an ongoing series about your evolving system.

Blamelessness then becomes more than “don’t point fingers”—it becomes curiosity-driven storytelling: how did this ensemble of people, processes, and components collectively create this outcome?

Borrowing from Narrative Structure: Setup, Conflict, Resolution, Growth

Writers use common narrative structures because they’re memorable and meaningful. You can do the same for outages. Try framing your incident narrative around four beats:

1. Setup: The World Before

What was “normal”? Describe:

The system’s state (traffic levels, recent changes, known risks)
The team’s context (on-call rotation, experience levels, recent incidents)
Any “Chekhov’s guns” on the wall—latent conditions that will matter later (e.g., a brittle integration, a long-standing TODO, noisy alerts that people had learned to ignore)

The goal: help future readers understand what everyone believed to be true before the incident.

2. Conflict: The Incident Unfolds

This is where the action lives—but resist turning it into a dense, minute-by-minute log dump. Focus on:

Signals: What did monitoring, logs, or users tell you—and what did they not tell you?
Decisions: Why did the team choose certain hypotheses or mitigations?
Surprises: Where did reality diverge from mental models?

The incident is not just “the system failed.” It’s humans interacting with partial information under time pressure inside a complex system. That tension is your conflict.

3. Resolution: Stabilization and Recovery

Show not only how the system came back, but why those actions worked:

Which mitigations stabilized the system, and what trade-offs did you accept?
What did you learn mid-incident that changed your direction?
Which constraints (compliance, customers, dependencies) shaped your choices?

Here, focus on causal clarity: connect recovery steps clearly to underlying mechanisms so future readers can see how things fit together.

4. Growth: What Changed Because of This?

This is the often-missing fourth act.

What new capabilities did you build (runbooks, observability, automation)?
How did mental models shift ("we used to think X; now we know Y")?
How did team behavior or culture evolve (alert design, review practices, escalation patterns)?

This “growth” section turns your outage narrative into a character-driven learning artifact—not just a static incident report.

Character Arcs: People and Teams as Protagonists

Outage stories are ensemble dramas. There are no heroes and villains in a blameless culture, but there are characters whose perspectives matter:

The on-call engineer trying to triage conflicting signals
The incident commander juggling communication and decision-making
The product owner wrestling with customer impact vs. mitigation risk
The team that owned a component with hidden coupling

A strong incident narrative traces how these characters respond, adapt, and grow:

"Initially, we assumed the database was the bottleneck because of past incidents; after examining new metrics, we updated our hypothesis to focus on the message queue."
"We had no clear incident commander at first; after confusion, one engineer explicitly took the role, which streamlined communication."

Over time, these micro-arcs accumulate into a team arc:

How did we use to respond to incidents?
How do we behave now?
What habits, tools, and norms have changed along the way?

When people can see themselves as evolving characters in the story of the system, they’re more likely to engage with incident reviews as vehicles for growth, not bureaucratic chores.

Complex Systems as Story Universes

Modern software systems are not simple machines; they’re complex, adaptive systems with:

Many interacting components
Nonlinear effects (small changes, big consequences)
Feedback loops and emergent behavior

Narratively, your incident story is never about a single broken function or a single bad decision. It’s about how structure, hierarchy, and interactions shape outcomes.

A useful lens is to structure your story across hierarchical layers:

Local layer: The immediate bug or misconfiguration (e.g., a silent retry loop).
Service layer: How dependencies, timeouts, or backpressure propagated effects.
Organizational layer: How priorities, staffing, documentation, or review practices set the stage.
Ecosystem layer: External partners, third-party APIs, infrastructure providers, regulatory constraints.

By weaving these layers into your narrative, you frame the incident as a systemic story, not an isolated error. That framing:

Reduces the temptation to blame individuals
Makes root causes multi-dimensional, not singular
Reveals leverage points for meaningful change

Your “story universe” is the whole socio-technical system: code, infra, org charts, processes, and people.

Running a Storytelling Workshop for Incidents

To turn this into practice, treat your incident review like a mini writers’ room.

1. Assemble the Cast

Invite:

People directly involved (on-call, incident commanders, subject-matter experts)
Adjacent teams affected by the incident
A few “fresh eyes” who weren’t there, to test clarity and assumptions

2. Start with the Skeleton

Bring the blameless post-mortem draft as your raw script. Then:

Map it to setup / conflict / resolution / growth on a whiteboard or shared doc
Mark confusing or overly technical sections with “?” for clarification
Identify missing perspectives ("We never mention support or customers here")

3. Layer in Character and System Arcs

Ask:

Where did mental models change mid-incident?
Where did the system behave in surprising ways?
Which teams or roles are invisible in the current write-up but crucial to the story?

Encourage people to speak from their vantage point, then reconcile those views into a coherent, multi-perspective narrative.

4. Extract Themes and Reusable Patterns

Like showrunners, look for recurring themes across incidents:

“We consistently underestimate cross-region propagation delays.”
“We repeatedly see confusion around who is incident commander.”
“Alerts often fire but don’t encode enough context to act quickly.”

Name these patterns explicitly in the story. Over time, your Incident Story Cabinet becomes a library of archetypes (“the runaway retry storm,” “the missing backpressure,” “the ghost of deprecated config”) that new team members can learn from quickly.

Building Your Analog Incident Story Cabinet

“Analog” doesn’t mean paper-only; it means tangible, browsable, and human-readable, not just buried in a ticketing system.

Some practical approaches:

Incident zines or one-pagers: Distilled, narrative-focused summaries with diagrams and key quotes.
Physical wall of incidents: Printed summaries pinned to a team wall, organized by theme or system area.
Periodic story retrospectives: Once a quarter, choose 2–3 incidents and review them as a season of a show: what arcs and themes emerged?

The goal is to make your outage narratives visible and shared, not just archived.

Conclusion: From Failure Logs to Living Stories

Incidents and outages are inevitable in complex systems. Wasted incidents are not.

By treating outage reviews like story development in a writers’ room, you:

Turn blameless post-mortems into coherent, memorable narratives
Highlight teamwork and growth, not just technical failure
Make complex, systemic interactions understandable to people who weren’t there
Build a shared “canon” of stories that shape your culture and your engineering decisions

The Analog Incident Story Cabinet is ultimately about respecting the learning value of your outages. Each incident is an episode in the long-running series of how your team and your system grow together.

If you craft those episodes with intention—using structure, character arcs, and systemic thinking—you don’t just fix what broke. You write the story of how you become more resilient, more aligned, and more human as an engineering organization.