The Analog Incident Story Kite Wall: Flying Paper Failures to Feel How Risk Pulls Your System

Digital dashboards, runbooks, and incident timelines are powerful. But they all share a hidden flaw: they live behind glass. You can scroll past them, skim them, and forget them. Risk remains abstract.

An Incident Story Kite Wall changes that.

Imagine a physical wall covered with paper “kites” representing incidents and failures, each tethered by strings that show how risk pulls across your system. You can walk up to it, move things, argue about relationships, and watch patterns emerge in real time.

This post explores how an analog kite wall can help your team:

• Externalize complex incidents into a shared, visible problem space
• See how failures connect and how risk propagates
• Apply structured incident mapping and SRE principles in a tangible way
• Represent dependencies and business criticality like a low-tech knowledge graph
• Complement digital tools with a fast, low-friction medium for experimentation

Why Go Analog in a Digital World?

Complex systems fail in complex ways. When you’re stuck in tools and timelines, it’s easy to:

• Fixate on one component instead of the system
• Miss cross-cutting patterns between incidents
• Talk past each other because everyone sees a different slice of reality

Visual, analog tools help by externalizing the problem space. When issues get written down, pinned up, and connected with string:

• The system’s behavior becomes visible in one shared place.
• Ambiguity turns into concrete, movable objects.
• People can literally point at risk and argue constructively about it.

The kite wall is not anti-digital. It’s a thinking tool that complements your existing incident management stack.

What Is an Incident Story Kite Wall?

At its core, the kite wall is simple:

• Kites: Sheets of paper (or cards) representing incidents, contributing factors, or risk hotspots.
• Strings: Physical connections showing causality, dependency, propagation, or influence.
• The Wall: A shared space (whiteboard, corkboard, or actual wall) where the system’s risk story unfolds.

Each kite typically captures:

• Incident ID / name
• Systems or services involved
• Triggering event
• Impact (e.g., degraded latency, data loss, revenue loss)
• Key contributing factors (technical and organizational)

Then you start connecting them:

• This deployment leads to that database overload.
• This latent bug amplifies that dependency failure.
• This monitoring gap hides a failure until customers feel it.

Soon, you have a forest of flying paper failures, each tugging on others with visible tension.

Incident Mapping: Giving Structure to the Chaos

Without structure, a kite wall is just colorful chaos. This is where Incident Mapping techniques (like Kepner-Tregoe) help.

Kepner-Tregoe and similar methods push you to:

• Separate what happened from what didn’t happen (but could have)
• Identify contributing conditions, not just root causes
• Group details into themes and causal chains

You can reflect those ideas on the wall:

• Use colors to group themes (e.g., capacity, configuration, process, people).
• Use shapes or icons to differentiate events vs. conditions vs. controls.
• Use string styles (solid, dashed, arrows) to show different relationships:
  • Solid: direct causal link
  • Dashed: correlated or suspected
  • Arrowheads: direction of influence

Over time, your kite wall turns from a messy collage into a map of incident dynamics—a physical graph of how problems arise, spread, and get detected.

Bringing SRE Principles to the Kite Wall

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is all about measuring, understanding, and improving reliability. The kite wall becomes a living artifact of this work.

Here’s how SRE principles plug in:

1. SLIs, SLOs, and Impact

On each incident kite, note:

• Which SLIs were affected (latency, availability, error rate, freshness, etc.).
• Which SLOs were violated or threatened.

Visually clustering kites by affected SLOs helps you see:

• Which promises to users are most fragile.
• Where you repeatedly spend error budget.

2. Error Budgets and Risk Appetite

Mark incidents that consumed error budget with a standout visual (highlight, sticker, or border). This makes your risk appetite tangible:

• You can see which risks you’ve implicitly accepted.
• You can discuss whether those strings should be shortened (mitigated) or cut (de-scoped).

3. Feedback Loops and Detection Gaps

Add small "sensor" markers to show:

• How incidents were detected (alert, customer report, dashboard, side effect).
• Whether detection happened before, during, or after user impact.

Patterns emerge:

• Kites with many causes but few detection points = blind spots.
• Strings crossing services without corresponding monitoring links = observability debt.

4. Continuous Improvement

Use the wall to drive recurring SRE rituals:

• Monthly reliability reviews around the wall
• Thematic post-incident retrospectives
• Prioritization of reliability work informed by what the wall reveals

The kite wall becomes a physical Kanban for reliability improvements, grounded in real failures rather than theoretical risk.

Modeling Dependencies and Data Flows Like a Low-Tech Knowledge Graph

Digital systems have complex webs of:

• Service dependencies
• Data pipelines and transformations
• Infrastructure layers
• Business processes and customers

In many organizations, this lives in scattered wikis, outdated diagrams, or someone’s head.

The kite wall acts like a lightweight, analog knowledge graph:

• Place core services or domains near the center.
• Put external dependencies (payments provider, auth, third-party APIs) on the edges.
• Tie incidents to the services and dependencies they touch with string.
• Represent data flows with directional strings or arrows between kites and services.
• Indicate business criticality with size, color intensity, or placement (e.g., top = more critical).

Over time you’ll notice:

• Certain services are magnets for strings: reliability bottlenecks.
• Long chains of kites between systems: high propagation risk.
• "Orphan" kites that don’t seem connected: missing knowledge or incomplete modeling.

This makes the risk relationships visible and actionable:

• You can ask, "What if this one service fails?" and literally follow the strings.
• You can see how a local change might create global impact.

The Power of Touch: Collaboration Through Movement

One of the biggest benefits of going analog is embodied collaboration.

When engineers and stakeholders stand at the wall together:

• People physically move kites to propose new mental models.
• Disagreements turn into experiments: "What if we connect this incident here instead?" (Then you just move the string.)
• Non-engineers can participate by pointing, asking questions, and suggesting relationships without needing tool expertise.

The act of arranging, moving, and connecting:

• Encourages shared understanding of how the system behaves.
• Reveals hidden assumptions ("Wait, you thought this service talked directly to that database?")
• Builds psychological safety: we’re not blaming, we’re mapping.

This is particularly powerful in cross-functional incident reviews, where you need legal, support, product, and engineering to reach a common story.

Complementing (Not Replacing) Digital Tools

The kite wall is not a substitute for:

• Incident management platforms
• Logs, metrics, and traces
• Ticketing and documentation

Instead, it fills a crucial gap:

• Low friction: You can add, move, and rewire incidents in seconds.
• Exploratory: You can try different views of causality and risk without editing diagrams in version control.
• Spatial memory: People remember where things are and how they link.

A healthy practice connects both worlds:

• Each kite references a digital source of truth (postmortem doc, incident ticket).
• Photos of the wall are archived after major revisions.
• Insights from the wall feed back into your architecture diagrams, runbooks, and on-call training.

The analog wall becomes a living laboratory, while your digital tools remain your system of record.

Getting Started: A Simple Recipe

You don’t need a big program to try this.

1. Pick a wall in a collaborative space.
2. Collect incidents from the last 3–6 months (focus on impactful or puzzling ones).
3. Create one kite per incident with:
   • Name / ID
   • Date and duration
   • Impact summary
   • Main contributing factors
4. Place core services and domains on the wall as anchors.
5. Connect incidents to services and to each other using string:
   • "This incident contributed to that one."
   • "This dependency was involved in both."
6. Add meaning with color and shape (themes, severity, SLOs, etc.).
7. Walk the wall together in a 60–90 minute session and ask:
   • Where are strings densest?
   • Which incidents seem to repeat a theme?
   • What would we be terrified to cut or change?
8. Capture 3–5 improvement ideas and turn them into concrete, owned work.

Repeat every month or quarter. Let the wall evolve.

Conclusion: Feeling the Pull of Risk

Modern systems hide their complexity well—until they don’t. When incidents hit, you often see only fragments: a log line here, a metric spike there, a terse incident timeline.

An Incident Story Kite Wall turns those fragments into a shared, visible story. By flying your paper failures on strings, you:

• Make hidden dependencies and risk propagation visible
• Give structure to messy incidents through mapping techniques
• Anchor SRE principles in something you can see and touch
• Foster collaboration and shared understanding across roles
• Complement digital tools with a fast, exploratory medium

Most importantly, you feel how risk pulls on your system—literally standing in front of a web of strings that tighten whenever something goes wrong. That visceral understanding is hard to get from a dashboard, and it’s exactly what makes the analog kite wall such a powerful tool for building more resilient systems.