Introduction

Most teams treat incidents as lines in a spreadsheet or bullets in a slide deck. We sort, filter, and color-code them—but they remain flat lists. The problem is that complex systems don’t behave like lists. They behave like messy, interconnected worlds, where failures cluster in surprising places and ripple across components in non-obvious ways.

Enter the Analog Incident Story Globe: a 3D paper model that lets you literally map incidents and hidden failure zones onto a globe-like representation of your system.

Instead of staring at yet another dashboard, your team stands around a paper globe, adding markers, drawing lines, and watching clusters of risk emerge like meteorite impact sites on a planet. It’s low-tech, tactile, and surprisingly powerful.

In this post, we’ll explore what the Incident Story Globe is, how to build and use one, and why this analog artifact can meaningfully improve your incident analysis, SRE postmortems, and long-term reliability work.

What Is the Analog Incident Story Globe?

The Analog Incident Story Globe is a physical 3D model of your system’s risk landscape:

• It’s typically a paper globe assembled from printed segments (like a DIY paper Earth model).
• Each surface region on the globe represents an area of your architecture or infrastructure—services, domains, data flows, platforms, or environments.
• Location markers (stickers, dots, string, markers) are used to represent incidents, dependencies, and potential failure zones.

Think of it as building a planet of your system, then plotting historical outages, near-misses, and known weaknesses onto its surface. Over time, your globe becomes a living, 3D map of where your system tends to break—and what’s at stake when it does.

Why Make Incidents Spatial?

We typically document failures in linear forms:

• Incident trackers
• Postmortem docs
• Jira tickets or similar systems

These are great for accountability and searchability, but they hide patterns in plain sight. When incidents are just rows in a table, it’s hard to feel how they cluster around:

• Specific services or subsystems
• Fragile integrations or data pipelines
• Shared infrastructure layers (e.g., auth, networking, storage)

By contrast, a globe:

• Encourages spatial thinking: you can see clusters and deserts of activity.
• Makes relationships and proximity visible: paths drawn across the globe can represent data flows, dependency chains, or blast radii.
• Reveals hidden failure zones: those uncomfortable areas where “we haven’t had an incident yet, but if we did, the consequences would be severe.”

The analog form matters. Standing together, physically pointing at the same artifact, you get:

• A shared, concrete reference point
• More inclusive conversations (non-experts can literally see what’s going on)
• A slower, more reflective pace that supports learning rather than blame

Building Your Story Globe

You don’t need special gear. You can build an Incident Story Globe with basic office supplies.

1. Create or Print the Globe

Options:

• Printable paper globe templates (search for “paper globe net” or “geodesic paper globe template”).
• Blank globe kits or kids’ craft globes.
• A foam or cardboard sphere you can tape paper segments onto.

Aim for something large enough to work on as a group—volleyball size works well.

2. Define Your “Geography”

Decide how the globe’s surface maps to your system. A few patterns:

• Continents as major domains: e.g., Customer Experience, Internal Tools, Data Platform, Infrastructure.
• Lat/Long as layers: e.g., “north” as user-facing apps, “south” as infrastructure; “equator” as shared platforms.
• Time zones as environments: Prod, Staging, Dev, Experiments.

You don’t need perfection; you need consistency. Make a legend that explains how the regions map to your architecture.

3. Choose Your Markers

Use simple, clear visual vocabulary:

• Colored dot stickers for incidents (e.g., red = sev1, orange = sev2).
• Triangles or different color for near-misses.
• Lines or string for dependencies or data flows.
• Shaded regions for high-risk areas or known tech debt.

Post a small key near the globe. The goal is that someone new can read it at a glance.

Plotting Incidents Like Meteorite Impacts

With your globe ready, you can start mapping incidents.

How to Place an Incident

For each incident or postmortem:

1. Identify the primary impact zone

   • Where in your architecture did the failure manifest? (e.g., Payments API, Authentication service, Data ingestion pipeline.)

2. Mark the entry point

   • Place a dot where the incident “landed” first—like a meteor impact site.

3. Trace the blast radius

   • Use lines or arcs to show which components were affected next.

4. Indicate severity and risk

   • Dot color, size, or label can show severity, customer impact, or financial risk.

5. Add context

   • On a small sticky or index card, note:
     • Date
     • Short summary
     • Root causes / contributing factors
     • Key learning or remediation theme

Place these cards around the globe or on a nearby board, indexed by a simple incident ID.

What Starts to Appear

After even a handful of incidents, you’ll often see:

• Dense clusters: repeated pain in the same subsystem or integration.
• Intersection points: where many dependency lines cross (shared risk concentrations).
• Quiet but critical regions: high-risk areas with few incidents—often under-instrumented or under-tested.

These patterns are easy to miss in spreadsheets but obvious on a globe.

The Globe as a Risk Profiling Tool

The Story Globe is more than a retrospective toy—it’s a tangible aid for risk profiling.

Use it to ask questions like:

• Where would a new failure be most expensive to fix?
• Which areas could trigger regulatory or compliance issues?
• Where are we under-protected given the potential impact (e.g., lacking redundancy, observability, or runbooks)?

You can layer this information onto the globe:

• Draw thicker outlines around regions with high regulatory exposure.
• Use hatching or shading for systems with chronic tech debt.
• Place stars or flags on areas targeted for resilience improvements.

This transforms the globe into a 3D risk map: not just where incidents happened, but where the next critical one is most likely or most damaging.

Pairing the Globe with Blameless Postmortems

The Story Globe fits naturally into blameless, SRE-style postmortems.

Instead of starting with, “Who was on call?” or “What broke?”, you start with:

“Where on our world did this story take place?”

Practical ways to integrate it:

• During the postmortem meeting

  • Have someone stand at the globe and map the incident story as it’s told:
    • Entry point
    • Escalation path
    • Mitigation path
  • Let participants physically point to and discuss regions involved.

• After the postmortem

  • Add final markers and update risk shading or annotations.
  • Attach the postmortem link or ID to the incident marker.

This reframes incidents as systemic narratives unfolding across a landscape, not individual failures by people. The globe becomes a shared story device that:

• Reinforces systems thinking
• Supports psychological safety (the “problem” is on the globe, not in a person)
• Makes learning visual and collaborative

From Incident List to Living Artifact

Over months or quarters, your Incident Story Globe evolves from a craft project into a living artifact of your system’s:

• Incident history
• Architectural hotspots
• Risk concentrations
• Reliability improvements

You can use this artifact to:

• Guide roadmap discussions

  • “This region has the highest density of sev1 incidents—what investment can we make here next quarter?”

• Review progress over time

  • Take photos each quarter; compare before/after patterns.
  • Track whether clusters shrink, shift, or multiply.

• Onboard new team members

  • Walk them around the globe to explain where the system tends to hurt.

• Align stakeholders

  • Show leadership a concrete, visual explanation of why resilience work is critical.

The globe doesn’t replace your incident tooling. It complements it by making patterns visible, tangible, and shared.

Getting Started with Your Own Story Globe

To try this with your team:

1. Pick a timebox

   • Run a 60–90 minute workshop to build and annotate the first version.

2. Choose a scope

   • Start with the last 3–6 months of production incidents.

3. Define the mapping rules

   • Agree on how regions, colors, and lines are used.

4. Map incidents together

   • Invite engineers, SREs, product, and support to participate.

5. End with reflection

   • Ask: What patterns surprised us? What should we explore or change next?

Keep the globe in a visible, shared space. Make updating it part of your incident review and postmortem rituals.

Conclusion

The Analog Incident Story Globe is deceptively simple: just paper, markers, and a bit of string. But by turning your system into a 3D world and your incidents into visible impact sites, it encourages a different kind of thinking—spatial, systemic, and shared.

Instead of treating incidents as isolated failures to be fixed and forgotten, the globe helps you:

• See clusters and hidden failure zones
• Profile where risk and cost truly live in your system
• Make postmortems more blameless, collaborative, and visual
• Build a living artifact that guides reliability and resilience work over time

In a world saturated with digital dashboards, a simple analog globe can quietly become one of your most powerful tools for learning from failure—and for reshaping the world your systems inhabit.