The Analog Incident Story Compass Atrium: Growing a Walk‑Through Paper Garden for Everyday Reliability Practice

What if incident response training felt less like reading a runbook and more like walking through a story?

The Analog Incident Story Compass Atrium is an experimental installation that does exactly that. It transforms incident management concepts into a walk‑through paper garden—a physical, narrative space where reliability is practiced as an everyday craft instead of a once‑in‑a‑while crisis ritual.

This Atrium treats incidents as stories, not just timelines. It uses LLM‑generated narratives, paper artifacts, and interactive prompts to help teams feel their way through incidents, not just understand them intellectually.

In this post, we’ll explore how the Attrium works, what it teaches about reliability, and why combining art, technology, and embodied learning can fundamentally change how teams think about incident response.

From Abstract Runbooks to a Walk‑Through Paper Garden

Most incident response education is abstract:

PDFs and wikis full of procedures
Checklists that live in tools no one opens until things break
Diagrams that are technically accurate but emotionally flat

The Analog Incident Story Compass Atrium pushes in the opposite direction. It creates an immersive, analog environment where incident concepts are turned into physical objects:

Paper “vines” that trace causal chains from small signals to major outages
Folded story leaves that capture perspectives from on‑call engineers, product owners, and customers
Floor markings that guide you through the stages of an incident: detection, triage, communication, mitigation, learning
Hand‑written “alerts” pinned to walls, echoing Slack messages or monitoring pages

Visitors don’t just read about incident response—they walk through it.

The intent isn’t to replace digital tools, but to counterbalance them: when so much of our incident work is disembodied and screen‑bound, the Atrium re‑anchors reliability practice in touch, movement, and shared presence.

Incidents as Stories, Not Just Timelines

Traditional incident reports often emphasize:

timestamps
metrics (latency, error rates, CPU usage)
actions taken, in order

Those details matter, but they rarely tell us how it felt to be in the incident, or how the context shaped what people noticed, missed, or prioritized.

The Story Compass Atrium reframes incidents as narratives with:

Characters (SREs, customer support, on‑call engineers, automated systems, even the pager itself)
Settings (the middle of the night, a peak traffic event, a deploy window)
Conflict (a failing dependency, a misunderstood alert, conflicting priorities)
Turning points (when someone reframed the problem, escalated, or decided to roll back)
Resolutions and open questions (what we fixed, what we still don’t understand)

As you move through the garden, you follow these narrative threads:

One path might trace how a minor alert eventually cascaded into a serious outage.
Another might explore how a misconfigured incident channel slowed response.
A third might highlight the human decision points that turned a near‑miss into a success story.

By framing incidents as stories, the Atrium helps teams see incidents as multi‑layered experiences, not just sequences of events. This strengthens recall, empathy, and systems thinking.

How LLMs Help Weave Incident Narratives

Behind the scenes, the Atrium has a quiet digital partner: large language models (LLMs).

Modern incident tooling is increasingly using LLMs to turn noisy, fragmented context into coherent summaries:

synthesizing Slack threads into concise situation reports
summarizing alert payloads and logs for quick triage
generating initial post‑incident reports from raw event timelines

The Atrium mirrors this shift in a tangible form. The narratives printed on paper leaves and story panels are derived from:

Unstructured chat logs
Incident timelines
Ticket updates
Monitoring annotations

LLMs are used to:

Extract key narrative arcs from real incident data (anonymized and redacted).
Transform raw event streams into readable stories that foreground decisions, tensions, and tradeoffs.
Highlight patterns across incidents—recurring failure modes, communication gaps, or hero stories.

Those synthesized narratives are then re‑rendered as analog artifacts: handwritten cards, letter‑pressed story fragments, folded zines you can pick up and carry.

The result: visitors encounter a curated, human‑readable story grown from the same unstructured, messy data that teams actually produce during incidents.

Clear, Written Plans: The “Root System” of the Garden

One of the most important messages the Atrium reinforces is almost old‑fashioned: write it down.

As visitors walk the garden, they encounter:

Playbook “plaques” – clear, printed incident response plans for common scenarios
Call tree diagrams – who to contact, how, and in what order
Channel signage – which communication channels to use, and for what purpose

These written artifacts echo best practices from traditional incident management:

Have documented roles (incident commander, communications liaison, operations lead, etc.).
Keep step‑by‑step guidance visible and accessible—printed, not buried in a wiki.
Ensure everyone knows where to find the plan before an incident hits.

In the Atrium’s metaphor, written plans are treated as the root system beneath the paper garden: mostly invisible during calm times, absolutely critical when storms hit.

The installation makes a subtle point: magical AI tools and exquisite narratives are not substitutes for clear, shared, stable procedures. They are complements.

Not All Incidents Are the Same: Tailored Paths, Not One‑Size‑Fits‑All

Another key teaching of the Story Compass Atrium is that different incidents need different responses.

The garden is divided into distinct paths, each representing a type of incident:

Physical security path – badge failures, unauthorized access, facility issues
Data protection and privacy path – suspected breaches, data leaks, compliance impacts
Infrastructure and availability path – outages, degraded performance, capacity issues
Third‑party dependency path – upstream provider failures, API rate limits, SaaS outages

Each path has its own:

set of story artifacts
tailored runbooks
distinct communication patterns and stakeholders

By physically walking different paths, visitors internalize that:

A data breach isn’t just “another incident.” It triggers legal review, regulatory clocks, and customer communication constraints.
A physical security issue may require coordination with facilities, HR, or external partners.
An infrastructure outage might prioritize speed and rollback, whereas a slow data‑quality drift might demand careful analysis and communication.

The message is simple but often neglected: reliability practice is situational. Effective incident response demands specialized playbooks, not a single generic one.

Why Embodied, Multisensory Learning Works Better

The Atrium is grounded in research on embodied cognition and multisensory learning, which suggests that:

We remember concepts better when they’re tied to physical movement and spatial layouts.
Tactile interaction—touching, arranging, annotating—can deepen conceptual understanding.
Learning that engages multiple senses (sight, touch, motion, sometimes sound) tends to be stickier than purely verbal or visual instruction.

In practice, this means:

Walking a path that “feels” like escalation—from dim to bright lighting, from sparse to dense story artifacts—helps encode the stages of an incident.
Physically re‑arranging story cards to propose alternative responses makes experimentation safe and memorable.
Seeing cause‑and‑effect drawn as tangled vines rather than neat diagrams invites more realistic thinking about complexity and non‑linearity.

By the time a team leaves the Atrium, they are not just reciting steps—they’ve built muscle memory for how incidents unfold, who gets involved, and where the friction tends to appear.

Reliability as Everyday Practice, Not Just Post‑Mortems

Many organizations treat reliability learning as something that happens after a big incident:

We run a post‑incident review.
We write a report.
We file follow‑up tasks.

Then we move on.

The Story Compass Atrium is designed to oppose that rhythm. It invites teams to:

Visit regularly, not only after a disaster.
Add new story leaves as minor incidents and near‑misses occur.
Use the space for onboarding, tabletop exercises, and quiet reflection.

This reframes reliability as an ongoing learning process:

Incidents—large and small—become seeds for continuous storytelling and practice.
People who rarely touch production (design, marketing, leadership) can still walk through and understand what incidents feel like.
Teams build a shared culture of curiosity around failure and resilience.

By merging art (the garden), technology (LLMs), and pedagogy (learning science), the Atrium turns reliability into something communal, creative, and alive.

Bringing the Atrium Mindset into Your Organization

You might not be ready to build a full paper garden, but you can borrow principles from the Analog Incident Story Compass Atrium:

Tell stories, not just timelines.
- Add narrative sections to incident reports: what it felt like, what surprised you, how decisions were made.
Use LLMs as narrative helpers.
- Summarize Slack channels, logs, and tickets into readable, human‑centric incident summaries.
Make plans visible and physical.
- Print your key runbooks and escalation paths. Put them near desks and war rooms.
Tailor playbooks to incident types.
- Distinguish between security, data, infrastructure, and third‑party incidents.
Create small, analog rituals.
- A wall of incident postcards. A quarterly “story walk” where teams share short incident narratives. A manual timeline wall for major events.
Treat reliability as everyday learning.
- Use small incidents and near‑misses as prompts for micro‑reviews and shared reflection.

Conclusion: Growing A Culture of Reliability, One Story at a Time

The Analog Incident Story Compass Atrium shows that reliability isn’t just about tools, alerts, and dashboards. It’s about how people experience incidents, tell stories about them, and practice responding—again and again—before and after things break.

By turning incident‑response concepts into a walk‑through paper garden, the Atrium:

makes abstract ideas tangible
turns fragmented data into coherent narratives with LLMs
reinforces the value of clear, written, accessible plans
highlights the need for tailored playbooks by incident type
leverages embodied, multisensory learning
frames reliability as a shared, ongoing craft

In a world of increasingly complex systems, we need more than automation and metrics; we need spaces—physical and conceptual—where we can slow down, walk around, and listen to the stories our incidents are trying to tell us.

The Atrium is one such space. You can start building your own today, even if it begins with nothing more than a wall, some paper, and the commitment to treat every incident as a story worth learning from.