The Analog Incident Story Deck: Turning Past Outages into Shuffleable Decision Cards on Your Desk

Most teams treat incidents as something to survive, document, and file away.

You write the postmortem, log it in a tool, maybe do a retro, and move on. Months later, when a similar outage hits, muscle memory fails and the same mistakes resurface—only now under even more pressure.

There’s a better way: turn your past outages into physical, analog story cards you can shuffle, sort, and reuse.

Welcome to the Analog Incident Story Deck—a simple but powerful way to transform incidents from one-time failures into an evolving, hands-on learning system.

Why Incidents Belong on Your Desk, Not Just in a Wiki

Digital postmortems are important, but they’re also easy to ignore. They sit in Confluence, Notion, or a ticketing system, rarely revisited unless someone is doing a root-cause archaeology expedition.

Physical cards change that:

• They’re visible – sitting on your desk or in a team space, they become constant prompts.
• They’re tactile – you can literally shuffle, group, and sequence them.
• They’re portable – bring the deck to game days, on-call training, or planning sessions.

By turning incidents into cards, you make them:

• Easy to reuse as training scenarios
• Simple to remix into different exercises
• Hard to ignore as ongoing sources of learning

Instead of “that outage last year,” you now have a concrete object—a story card—ready to be played, discussed, and practiced.

From Postmortem to Story Card: Capturing the Right Details

The power of the deck comes from how you encode incidents.

You’re not just summarizing “what happened.” You’re extracting decision points:

• What choices did people face in the moment?
• What information did they have (or think they had)?
• Why did they choose Path A instead of Path B?
• How did those decisions shape the outcome—for better or worse?

Suggested Card Layout

You don’t need a fancy template to start. An index card or small card stock is enough. Here’s a simple structure:

Front of the card

• Title: Short, memorable name
  • Example: The Cache Flush That Took Us Down
• Context snapshot (1–2 lines)
  • Systems affected, rough timeframe, impact level
• Key decision point #1 (prompt-style)
  • “Database latency is spiking; dashboards suggest CPU saturation. What do you try first?”

Back of the card

• What actually happened (brief narrative)
• Critical decisions and why they were made
  • “We chose to scale replicas because dashboards misled us toward CPU, not I/O.”
• Outcome
  • Time to detection, time to mitigation, user impact
• Revealed gaps
  • Monitoring blind spots, runbook gaps, role confusion, unsafe assumptions
• Practice hooks
  • “In a game day, pause here: what else could we have tried?”

The key is to treat each incident as a story about human decision-making under uncertainty, not just a broken system.

Designing Game Days Around Real Incident Stories

Once you have a handful of incident cards, you can design game day exercises that feel real—because they are.

Instead of contrived scenarios like “the database is down,” you recreate the messy, partial, misleading reality of actual outages.

Step 1: Pick a Story Card

Select a card that matches your training goal:

• New on-caller onboarding → a high-impact but well-understood incident
• Advanced drills → a subtle, multi-factor failure involving misleading signals
• Cross-team coordination → an incident that required multiple services and teams

Step 2: Turn the Story into a Scenario Timeline

Break the incident into beats or phases you can reveal gradually:

1. Initial signal – alert firing, user report, anomaly in logs
2. First interpretation – what it looked like at first glance
3. Early actions – initial fixes, rollbacks, or mitigation attempts
4. Escalations and pivots – when the team realized something else was wrong
5. Resolution – the actual fix and verification
6. Aftermath – what was learned, what was changed

For each beat, turn it into a prompt:

• “The error budget alert fires for the payments API. The graphs show 5xx spikes and increased latency. What do you check first?”
• “You’ve rolled back the latest deployment, but errors persist. What do you do now?”

Step 3: Run the Exercise Like a Live Incident

During the game day:

• Present information incrementally, just as it unfolded.
• Ask participants what they would do at each step.
• Reveal what was actually done, and what happened as a consequence.
• Pause to discuss:
  • Were there better options with the information available?
  • What signals were misleading or missing?
  • How would they communicate with stakeholders?

You can run the scenario:

• As a tabletop exercise with just paper and discussion.
• As a live-fire game day by simulating failures in a staging or production-safe environment.

Either way, the incident card remains the backbone of the story.

Incidents as Narratives of System and Process Gaps

If you only look at “root cause,” you miss the real value of incident stories.

Each outage is a narrative of gaps:

• Gaps in observability: missing or misleading metrics, logs, and traces
• Gaps in process: unclear handoffs, missing runbooks, no escalation paths
• Gaps in safety mechanisms: missing rate limits, bad defaults, unsafe configs
• Gaps in shared understanding: differing mental models between teams

Your story cards should highlight these:

• "We assumed the cache was idempotent, but invalidation behavior was risky."
• "On-call didn’t know about the emergency feature flag."
• "We had an alert for error rate, but not for queue depth, so we caught it late."

By encoding these in cards, you transform airy “lessons learned” into concrete, reusable learning objects.

Encoding the “Why” into Repeatable Practice

Post-incident analysis often documents what broke. The strongest learning comes from digging into why decisions made sense at the time.

For each card, explicitly capture:

• Available information at the time
• Team beliefs and assumptions
• Pressures and constraints (time, user impact, management expectations)

Then turn those into exercises:

• "Given this partial dashboard screenshot, what hypotheses do you form?"
• "You’re under pressure to restore service in 10 minutes. Do you roll back or scale up? Why?"

This approach trains:

• Pattern recognition under uncertainty
• Making and revising hypotheses quickly
• Communicating clearly while thinking and acting

You’re not only preparing for specific past outages—you’re building incident reasoning skills.

Using Story Cards in Regular Readiness Drills

A deck of incident story cards shines when it becomes part of your ongoing rhythm, not a one-off workshop tool.

Ideas for Integrating the Deck

• Weekly or biweekly incident club
  • Pick a card, walk through the story, discuss decisions.
• On-call warmups
  • Before a new engineer’s first shift, run through 1–2 relevant cards.
• Cross-team alignment sessions
  • Choose an incident that affected multiple services; let each team narrate its perspective.
• Pre-launch readiness reviews
  • Shuffle the deck and ask: “Which failure modes from past incidents could this new feature trigger?”

Over time, you’ll see improvements in:

• Team coordination – clearer roles, fewer dropped balls
• Response speed – faster detection, more decisive early moves
• Confidence – on-call engineers feel prepared because they’ve seen similar stories before

Closing the Learning Loop: Evolving Your Deck

The Analog Incident Story Deck is never finished. It evolves with every new outage.

After each incident:

1. Run your usual post-incident analysis.
2. Identify the key decision points, gaps, and narrative arc.
3. Create (or update) a story card.
4. Add it to the deck and schedule it into an upcoming drill.
5. Refine older cards if new perspectives emerge.

You’re effectively building a living, analog playbook:

• Not just a static list of runbooks and checklists
• But a curated set of stories, decisions, and lessons that keep getting richer

Over months and years, this becomes an organizational memory you can hold in your hand.

Getting Started: A Simple First Step

You don’t need budget, tools, or executive buy-in to begin.

This week, try:

1. Pick one memorable incident from the last 6–12 months.
2. Print the postmortem or open it side by side.
3. On a single index card, capture:
   • Title and quick context
   • 2–3 key decision points (as prompts)
   • 2–3 revealed gaps
4. Use that card in a 30-minute tabletop conversation with your team.

If it sparks engagement, make a second card. Then a third. Before long, you’ll have a deck.

Conclusion: Make Your Incidents Shuffleable

Incidents are expensive—but the most wasteful thing you can do with them is treat them as one-time events.

By turning outages into analog, shuffleable story cards, you:

• Keep critical lessons visible and tangible
• Train teams on real decisions under real constraints
• Design high-fidelity game days grounded in reality, not hypotheticals
• Continuously refine your incident response playbook as new stories unfold

You already paid for those outages. The Analog Incident Story Deck helps you keep collecting value from them—every time you shuffle, deal, and play another story at the table.