The Analog Incident Story Field Guide: Sketching Paper Creatures of Failure to Track How Outages Really Behave

Incidents rarely behave the way we expect.

Dashboards light up, alerts scream, logs explode, and a dozen people pile into a call. Somewhere inside that chaos, your system is telling you a story. But most teams only capture a thin slice of that story—a root cause, a timeline, and a few bullet points for the postmortem.

What if you treated outages more like wildlife encounters than mechanical breakdowns? Instead of “fixing a bug,” you’re tracking a recurring animal in the field: observing it, naming it, sketching it, and learning its habits.

This is where an analog incident story field guide comes in—a tangible, low‑tech way to document the strange creatures of failure that roam your systems, so you can recognize and handle them faster the next time they appear.

From IRPGs to Incident Field Guides

Firefighters and first responders have long relied on standardized field guides. One well‑known example is the Incident Response Pocket Guide (IRPG) used by wildland firefighters. It’s a slim, analog reference they can carry into chaotic situations—packed with:

Battle‑tested procedures
Clear checklists
Compact decision aids
Shared terminology

These guides don’t try to be encyclopedias. They’re designed for real people under real stress who must coordinate under pressure and make decisions in minutes.

Software teams have incident runbooks and on‑call docs, but they’re often:

Buried in wikis
Written like dry manuals
Focused on components, not patterns of failure

An incident story field guide borrows the IRPG mindset and adapts it to complex online systems. Instead of “how service X works,” it documents how certain failure patterns tend to behave, and what your team has learned about dealing with them.

Why Root Cause Alone Isn’t Enough

Most organizations still treat post‑incident learning as a hunt for the root cause.

Root cause analysis is valuable, especially for deeply understanding specific failures. But in complex systems, failures rarely come from a single isolated error. More often, you’re seeing:

Multiple interacting faults
Feedback loops
Latent configuration choices
Human shortcuts and workarounds

If your postmortem stops at “misconfigured load balancer” or “missing index,” you miss the larger recurring pattern:

Why was that misconfiguration possible and plausible?
What made it hard to detect early?
What other components responded in surprising ways?
When have we seen something like this before?

A field guide aims to capture patterns across incidents, not just tidy explanations of one. It turns “this outage was caused by X” into “this is the third time we’ve seen this kind of creature.”

Meet Your Creatures of Failure

Every system has its own zoo of recurring incident types—your creatures of failure. They might look like:

The Thundering Herd – When many clients retry at once and crush a struggling service.
The Slow Squeeze – Latency and queue depth quietly rise for hours until everything grinds.
The Split Brain – Two components disagree on who’s in charge of a resource.
The Cascading Timeout Hydra – Timeouts trigger retries, which trigger more timeouts.

These creatures show up under different local details—different services, different releases—but their behavioral pattern is familiar.

By tracking and visualizing these patterns, you help your team:

Recognize them faster in the moment
Reuse known response strategies
Anticipate the “next move” of the failure

Instead of treating every incident as a brand‑new disaster, you’re asking:

“Which creature is this, and what does it usually do next?”

That mental shift can cut minutes or hours off response time.

Shared Mental Models: The Real Incident Superpower

Technology stacks are complicated, but humans working together under stress are even more complex. Effective outage response depends on shared mental models, not just technical skills.

During an incident, people need to quickly understand:

Goals – Are we protecting data, restoring availability, or reducing blast radius?
Roles – Who’s incident commander, who’s communicator, who’s deep in logs?
Strategies – Are we rolling back, failing over, or running controlled experiments?

Without shared mental models, your incident channel turns into:

Competing theories shouted past each other
Uncoordinated experiments
Confusion about authority and decision rights

A well‑designed analog field guide helps align those mental models, by:

Giving names to common creatures of failure
Codifying what “good practice” looks like under stress
Making expectations about roles and decisions visible and concrete

It’s not just documentation; it’s a tool for thinking together.

The Power of Checklists and Decision Aids

Under stress, even experts forget obvious steps. That’s why pilots, surgeons, and firefighters rely on checklists and simple decision aids.

Outages are no different. Lightweight aids can turn panicked firefighting into repeatable practice, for example:

A first 10 minutes checklist:
- Declare an incident
- Assign incident commander and scribe
- Freeze risky changes
- Confirm scope and user impact
A triage decision tree:
- Is this localized or global?
- Is rollback or failover available?
- Do we need a communication update now or can it wait?
A “when in doubt” play:
- Reduce optional load (batch jobs, heavy reports)
- Increase observability (enable more detailed logs in a controlled way)
- Stabilize before optimizing

In an analog incident field guide, these aren’t long policy docs. They’re short, visual prompts you can actually use while your heart rate is up.

How to Build Your Own Analog Incident Story Field Guide

You don’t need fancy tools to start. In fact, it’s better if you don’t. The point is to make something tangible, portable, and rough—so it invites use and iteration.

1. Start With Stories, Not Metrics

Pick 5–10 memorable incidents from the past year. For each one, collect:

A short narrative: “What happened, from the system’s point of view?”
Key turning points: “When did we first know it was bad? What changed the trajectory?”
Human decisions: “What choices did we make? What did we try that helped or hurt?”

Focus on how the failure behaved over time, not just what was wrong.

2. Sketch the Creature

For each recurring pattern you notice, give it:

A name (memorable, slightly playful)
A sketch (even a crude doodle)
A field card with:
- Typical triggers
- Early warning signs
- Common misdiagnoses (what it looks like at first)
- Known good responses and experiments to try
- “Watch out for…” pitfalls

This might fit on a single index card or half a page. The sketch matters more than you think—it makes the pattern memorable and teachable.

3. Extract Heuristics, Not Rules

Complex systems resist simple rules like “if X, always do Y.” Instead, look for heuristics:

“If queuing delay grows but CPU is low, suspect backpressure or coordination issues.”
“If timeouts increase after a partial deploy, consider mixed‑version behavior.”
“If multiple teams see oddness at once, think shared dependency first.”

Capture these as rules of thumb next to each creature. You’re building a library of situational clues, not a deterministic cookbook.

4. Add Role Guidance and Communication Prompts

A strong field guide isn’t just about the system; it’s about the team.

Include simple prompts like:

“When this creature appears, who should be pulled in early?”
“What’s the minimum information to share with stakeholders in the first 15 minutes?”
“What decisions must be explicitly owned (rollback, failover, user‑visible changes)?”

This supports that crucial shared understanding of goals, roles, and strategies.

5. Keep It Analog, Keep It Nearby

Print your field guide. Bind it, clip it, or keep it as:

A small ring of laminated cards
A zine‑style booklet near incident stations
A poster on the war‑room wall

The physical form does three things:

Visibility – People see it and remember to use it.
Legitimacy – If it’s printed, it feels real, not just a half‑finished doc.
Constraints – Paper forces you to be concise, visual, and practical.

You can always keep a more detailed digital appendix, but the analog version should be quick to flip, easy to skim, and safe to scribble on.

Studying How Failures Actually Behave

The more you build your field guide, the more you’ll see that real incidents:

Rarely follow clean, linear timelines
Often involve multiple contributing faults that only align occasionally
Expose gaps in monitoring, team coordination, and mental models

By paying attention to how failures behave—how they start, spread, and recede—you learn far more than from a single, flattened “root cause.”

Over time, your guide becomes a record of lived experience:

The weird corner cases that only show up in production
The surprising interactions between services
The human patterns—who tends to spot what, how confusion arises, what calms the room

That’s exactly the material you need to train new responders and grow real organizational resilience.

Conclusion: Make Failure Teachable, Not Just Fixable

Incidents are moments when your system, your tools, and your organization reveal how they really work. Capturing those moments as stories, sketches, and heuristics—not just root cause bullet points—turns painful outages into usable knowledge.

An analog incident story field guide helps your team:

Recognize recurring creatures of failure
Share mental models under stress
Coordinate with checklists and decision aids
Study how failures truly behave in complex environments

You already have the raw material: the war stories, the Slack transcripts, the tense video calls. The next step is to turn them into a field guide your team can carry into the next fire.

Not to prevent all failures—that’s impossible.

But to make sure that when the creatures come back, you can say:

“We’ve seen this one before. We know how it moves. Let’s get to work.”