Introduction

Most teams only start thinking seriously about incident response during an incident—right when everyone’s stress is highest and their thinking is worst.

But what if guidance was already there, quietly waiting? What if your team could literally spin a dial and see who owns what, what happens first, and which issue matters most—before panic kicks in?

That’s the idea behind the Analog Incident Story Compass: a simple, rotating paper dial that lives on your wall or desk and always points to your next best fix. Combined with a few digital tools and clear policies, it can turn chaotic outages into guided, almost routine stories with a clear beginning, middle, and end.

This isn’t about replacing your monitoring, paging, or ticketing tools. It’s about adding a low-friction, visual, and tactile layer on top of them that helps people make better decisions, faster.

Why Incidents Feel Chaotic (When They Don’t Have To)

When an outage hits, the chaos rarely comes from the technology alone. It usually comes from confusion:

• Who is actually in charge right now?
• Who talks to customers or executives?
• What do we do first?
• How do we decide which incident matters more?

Without clear answers, teams scramble, duplicate work, and argue about priorities. The result: longer outages, more stress, and more risk.

The solution is surprisingly simple: decide the structure in advance, make it visible, and make it hard to ignore.

That means:

1. Clear roles and responsibilities
2. A visible, predictable on‑call rotation
3. Simple triage rules anchored to business impact
4. Step‑by‑step, documented processes for running and closing incidents

The Analog Incident Story Compass is one way to bundle all of this into a physical object that sits in the center of your team’s attention.

Step 1: Define Roles, Responsibilities, and Policies Before the Fire

Before you make a dial, you need the story it will tell.

At minimum, define these incident roles clearly:

• Incident Commander (IC): Owns the incident timeline, decisions, and coordination. No hands-on debugging.
• Communications Lead: Handles updates to stakeholders, customers, and leadership.
• Technical Lead(s): Investigate root causes and execute fixes.
• Scribe / Incident Note-Taker: Keeps a log of what’s tried, what’s decided, and when.

Write down:

• Who can declare an incident?
• Who becomes IC by default (based on schedule or rotation)?
• What are your severity levels (SEV-1, SEV-2, etc.) and what do they mean in terms of business impact?
• What are the response time expectations for each severity?

This doesn’t need to be a 50-page policy. A single-page Incident Charter is often enough for small teams.

These roles and rules will later be printed or represented on your analog compass.

Step 2: The Rotating Incident Compass – A Quiet, Constant Pointer

Now the fun part: turn the theory into a physical, always-on reminder.

Imagine a paper wheel, pinned through the center, that can rotate over a background disc. Here’s what you can put on it:

Outer Ring: Time and On‑Call

The outer ring (background disc) shows:

• Days of the week or weekly blocks
• Current on‑call engineer
• Backup on‑call
• Incident Commander on‑call

As the week changes, you rotate the dial so the current day aligns with the primary on‑call and IC. At a glance, anyone can see:

“Right now, Alex is the IC, Sam is primary on‑call, Jordan is backup.”

No scrambling through calendars or Slack channels to figure it out.

Inner Ring: The Incident Story Steps

The rotating top layer shows the step-by-step process once an incident is declared. For example, a six-part cycle:

1. Detect & Declare – Confirm it’s an incident; assign an IC.
2. Triage & Classify – Apply simple if-then rules to set severity.
3. Stabilize – Stop the bleeding; apply quick mitigations.
4. Communicate – Send first update to stakeholders.
5. Investigate & Fix – Find root cause; implement long-term fix.
6. Close & Learn – Document incident, capture learnings, update runbooks.

You align a marker (like "NOW") to the current step. As the incident progresses, you rotate the wheel to the next step. The compass becomes a visible reminder: there is a path, and we are somewhere along it.

Why Analog Works So Well Here

• It’s always visible: on the wall, on a desk, near the on‑call station.
• It’s low-friction: no login, no app, no dashboard context-switching.
• It becomes a shared reference: everyone in the room sees the same thing.

The compass doesn’t replace your tooling; it anchors your humans to a consistent incident story.

Step 3: Blend Analog with Digital, Not Analog Instead Of Digital

The best incident setups combine:

• Digital systems for speed, automation, and scale
• Analog tools for clarity, shared understanding, and routine

Here’s a practical hybrid approach:

• Paging & Alerts: Use a modern on-call/paging tool (PagerDuty, Opsgenie, custom scripts, etc.). The analog compass just shows who’s currently on the hook.
• Runbooks & Checklists: Store them in a wiki, Git repo, or docs system. Put a short label or QR code on the compass that points to the main “Incident Runbook.”
• Incident Tracking: Use your ticketing system (Jira, Linear, ServiceNow, GitHub Issues). The analog dial’s steps map one-to-one with the digital ticket workflow.
• Status Updates: Maintain a digital status page; the compass simply reminds the IC when “Communicate” is the current step.

Think of the paper dial as your incident front page, and your digital systems as the linked pages behind it.

Step 4: Simple Tools for Small Teams: Start with a Spreadsheet

You do not need a complex incident management platform to begin. If you’re a small team, a simple spreadsheet can go a long way.

Columns might include:

• Incident ID
• Date/time detected
• System / vendor impacted
• Business impact description
• Severity (SEV-1–4)
• Current status
• Owner (IC)
• Next action

You can use filters or simple formulas to automatically:

• Highlight SEV-1 and SEV-2 incidents at the top
• Flag vendor outages that affect critical workflows (payments, authentication, etc.)
• Sort by business impact, not by who shouted the loudest

This spreadsheet becomes the digital twin of your analog compass: while the dial shows who and what step, the sheet shows which incidents currently matter most.

Step 5: If-Then Rules for Triage Based on Business Impact

To keep triage calm and consistent, define basic if-then rules tied to business outcomes, such as:

• If more than 50% of users cannot log in, then classify as SEV-1.
• If payments fail for any region, then classify as SEV-1, notify Finance.
• If response times are degraded but core actions still work, then classify as SEV-2.
• If only internal tools are affected and no customers are impacted, then classify as SEV-3 or SEV-4.

Print a short version of these rules on the back of your compass or around the edge.

This way, when the IC or on‑call person spins the dial to “Triage & Classify,” they literally flip or glance at the wheel and follow the rules. The decision is guided by policy, not by emotion.

Over time, as you learn more from real incidents, you can refine these rules—update the doc, then print a new version of the compass.

Step 6: Documented, Step‑By‑Step Processes

Tools help, but process is what keeps you from improvising under pressure.

Each “step” on your incident compass should map to a short, written process. For example:

1. Detect & Declare

• Verify alert or report isn’t a false positive.
• If severity is likely SEV-1 or SEV-2, declare an incident in your system.
• Assign or confirm the Incident Commander.

2. Triage & Classify

• Apply if-then severity rules.
• Identify affected systems and customers.
• Decide if additional teams must be paged.

3. Stabilize

• Aim for the fastest safe mitigation, not the perfect fix.
• Roll back bad deployments, fail over, or apply feature flags.

…and so on, through Communication, Investigation, and Closure.

These don’t have to be long. Even 3–5 bullet points per step is enough to keep people anchored.

The analog compass acts as a visual index to these processes; the digital doc holds the detail.

How to Build Your Own Paper Incident Compass

A quick practical guide:

1. Draft your content first

   • Define roles, severity levels, if-then triage rules, and the 5–7 main steps in your incident story.

2. Design the dial in a simple tool

   • Use a slide tool, drawing app, or even a word processor with shapes.
   • Outer ring: days / weeks + on-call slots.
   • Inner ring: incident steps + brief labels.

3. Print, cut, and assemble

   • Print both rings on sturdy paper.
   • Cut the inner circle so it can rotate on top of the outer.
   • Use a paper fastener (brad) or pin through the center.

4. Place it where incidents are run

   • Near the team area, NOC, or wherever the on‑call engineer sits.
   • Keep a marker or sticky notes handy to annotate live incidents.

5. Teach the team how to use it

   • Run a tabletop exercise: fake incident, spin the dial, walk through steps.
   • Iterate on what’s confusing or missing.

Conclusion: A Calm Pointer in the Middle of the Storm

Incidents will always be stressful, but they don’t have to be chaotic.

By:

• Defining roles, responsibilities, and policies in advance
• Visualizing on-call rotations with a simple, rotating compass
• Combining analog dials with digital systems
• Using if-then triage rules grounded in business impact
• Starting with simple tools like a spreadsheet and short runbooks

…you give your team a quiet, constant pointer to the next best fix.

The Analog Incident Story Compass is deceptively simple—a piece of paper on a pin. But in the middle of an outage, that tangible, rotating guide can make the difference between frantic reaction and deliberate, confident response.

If your incident process today lives only in people’s heads and scattered docs, start small: define your steps, sketch a wheel, and put it on the wall. Then let your next incident tell you what needs to be added to the story.