The Analog Incident Story Compass Garden: Planting a Desk-Sized Paper Landscape That Quietly Points to Your Riskiest Work

The Analog Incident Story Compass Garden

Planting a Desk-Sized Paper Landscape That Quietly Points to Your Riskiest Work

Most security and risk teams are drowning in data but starving for alignment.

You have dashboards, spreadsheets, SIEM alerts, OKRs, and quarterly reports. Yet when you ask, “What’s our riskiest work right now?” you get five different answers from five different people.

This is where the idea of an Analog Incident Story Compass Garden comes in: a desk-sized risk landscape—built on paper, shared across functions—that quietly points to your most critical risks every single day.

It’s not a fancy tool. It’s not AI. It’s not another dashboard.

It’s a simple, structured, visual map of risk that you can literally lay on the table, walk around, and update with a pen.

Below, we’ll walk through why this analog approach works, how to base it on a shared framework, and how to run “incident garden” exercises that turn static charts into a living, evolving compass for your riskiest work.

Why You Need a Shared Risk Landscape (Not Just More Data)

Before you plant your “garden,” you need soil: a common risk language and structure.

Most organizations already have a risk framework somewhere in a policy folder. But it often lives as dense text in PDFs, not as something people can see and use together.

Start with a Structured Framework (e.g., FERMA)

Frameworks like FERMA’s risk management standard give you:

Consistent risk categories (e.g., operational, strategic, financial, compliance, cyber)
Standard scoring dimensions (likelihood, impact, velocity, detectability)
Shared definitions that reduce endless debates about what “high risk” means

When you base your analog landscape on a structured, shared framework:

Every team visualizes risk in the same way
Leadership can see a unified picture across departments
Cross-functional discussions stay grounded in the same assumptions

The framework is the grammar. The analog landscape is the story.

From Spreadsheets to Landscapes: Design Your Risk Garden

Risk registers and reports are often heavy with text, acronyms, and numeric scores. People skim. They forget. They avoid.

Instead, treat security and risk data as a design problem:

How do we transform complex, text-heavy information into an intuitive visual landscape that people can literally "read at a glance"?

Step 1: Choose a Simple Grid

Start with a large sheet of paper—A3, poster board, or even a laminated mat you can reuse with dry-erase markers. Draw a clear grid.

A classic layout is:

X-axis: Likelihood (Rare → Almost Certain)
Y-axis: Impact (Low → Catastrophic)

Or, if strategy alignment is key:

X-axis: Time horizon (Now → 12+ months)
Y-axis: Strategic goal or mission impact (Minimal → Mission-critical)

The secret is consistency:

Use the same scoring scales for all teams
Use clear labels and legends on the sheet
Keep the grid simple enough that anyone can explain it in 30 seconds

Step 2: Encode More Info with Simple Visual Cues

Once you have the grid, you can layer in detail without clutter:

Color: Red for cyber, blue for operations, green for compliance, etc.
Shape: Circles for threats, squares for vulnerabilities, triangles for control gaps
Size: Larger markers for higher combined risk scores

When you place these on the grid, overlaps become visible:

A cyber threat that also stresses operational processes
A compliance issue that also hits your strategic reputation
A control weakness that affects multiple risk categories simultaneously

These simple visual cues make it far easier to spot where different risks interact and compound, rather than treating them as isolated entries in a spreadsheet.

Step 3: Make It Physically Manipulable

Make your landscape tactile:

Use sticky notes, magnets, or small cards for each risk
Leave space for short, plain-language labels (no jargon if you can help it)
Encourage people to move items as understanding evolves

As systems and threats grow more complex, analog or simplified visual tools often cut through the noise better than dense dashboards. What you lose in granular precision, you gain in shared understanding and memory.

The “Incident Garden” Exercise: Exploring Your Riskiest Work Together

Once you have the landscape, it’s time to invite people into the garden.

Think of this as a cross-functional tabletop exercise that uses the map as a shared board.

Who to Invite

Aim for representation from:

Security / Risk
Engineering / IT
Operations
Legal / Compliance
Product / Business owners
Incident response / SRE if applicable

The goal: put different mental models in the same room, orbiting the same physical map.

How to Run an Incident Garden Session

Set the scope
Pick a theme: “Customer data loss,” “Ransomware on core systems,” or “Third-party SaaS compromise.”
Seed the garden
Start with 5–10 known risks from your register. Place them on the grid based on current scores.
Ask each function to add their own cards
Prompt them:
- Where could your work fail in a way that supports this scenario?
- What dependencies do others have on you that might break?
- What assumptions are we making that might be wrong?
Trace an incident story across the landscape
Pick one realistic scenario and walk it step by step:
- “An attacker gains access to X…”
- “This affects Y because…”
- “We discover it when…” Move markers as you surface new information or realize impact/likelihood was misjudged.
Capture gaps and pain points in plain language
Next to the map, maintain a simple list:
- Controls we don’t have (but need)
- Metrics we should be collecting (but aren’t)
- Single points of failure
- Places where ownership is unclear

This process surfaces hidden dependencies and connective tissue that rarely show up in siloed risk reports.

From Session to Artifact: Turning Insights into a Compass

A powerful risk exercise doesn’t end with sticky notes on a table. It ends with artifacts that travel.

Create a Follow-Up Map That Others Can Use

After each incident garden session, capture:

A photo or clean redraw of the final landscape
A short narrative summary:
- What scenario did we walk through?
- What surprised us?
- Which risks moved on the grid and why?
A list of top gaps, each with:
- Owner
- Next step
- Rough timeframe

You can even maintain a versioned series of maps over time:

Before controls (initial state)
After key mitigations (updated state)

This makes risk work visible and lets leadership see how interventions are reshaping the landscape, not just nudging a number in a spreadsheet.

Planting a Desk-Sized Compass Garden

Finally, shrink the big workshop map into a small, durable, desk-sized version—one for each key leader or team.

This might be:

A laminated A4 sheet with your grid and the current top 10–15 risks
A fold-out card that lives in a notebook
A print-out taped beside a monitor

Why does this matter?

Because a small, persistent visual works like a nudge:

It keeps critical threats and weak spots in constant peripheral view
It quietly influences daily prioritization (“Do we really need that new feature before we fix this red zone?”)
It gives a quick way to re-anchor conversations (“Where on the map does this new initiative sit?”)

When people can literally point and say, “We’re working here, but the risk is over there,” misalignment becomes impossible to ignore.

Practical Tips to Make Your Risk Garden Stick

Start small. Pilot with one team or one major product area before scaling.
Use plain language. If non-technical stakeholders can’t read the map, it’s not finished.
Limit the number of risks. Focus on the top 10–20 for each view. If everything is on the map, nothing is.
Schedule updates. Refresh the landscape monthly or after major incidents/changes.
Invite disagreement. The most valuable moments come when two people insist a risk belongs in different places. That’s where learning happens.

Conclusion: Risk as a Shared Story, Not a Hidden Spreadsheet

The Analog Incident Story Compass Garden is more than a clever metaphor. It’s a shift in how you communicate and act on risk.

By:

Grounding your work in a shared framework
Using simple grids and consistent scoring
Turning text-heavy data into visual, tactile landscapes
Running cross-functional incident garden exercises
Capturing follow-up maps and reports as reusable artifacts
Keeping a desk-sized risk landscape always in view

…you transform risk from an abstract, centralized function into a visible, shared story everyone can see and navigate.

You don’t need more tools to know where your riskiest work is.

You need a landscape your people can stand around, argue over, and slowly, collectively, reshape.

That’s the real power of an analog incident story compass garden: it doesn’t just describe your risk—it quietly, persistently points you toward the work that matters most.