The Analog Incident Story Kitework Atlas

Hand‑Stitching Paper Flight Paths for Escalations Before They Stall

When incidents hit—outages, safety concerns, security scares—most organizations rely on an escalation process that looks good in a slide deck but collapses under real‑world pressure. People freeze, second‑guess, or skip steps entirely. The problem often isn’t lack of documentation. It’s that our escalation systems are built like brittle automation, not like tools for real human minds.

This post explores a different approach: treating incident escalation like an analog circuit design problem and creating a “Kitework Atlas”—a hand‑stitched, schematic‑style map of how incidents really move through your organization. By drawing paper flight paths for escalation before issues stall, you can restore clarity, confidence, and speed when things go sideways.

From Netlists to Story Maps: Why Structure Matters

In analog circuit design, there’s a critical distinction:

• A netlist is a text-based list of components and connections. Machines love it.
• A schematic is a visual, structured diagram that shows how the circuit actually works. Humans love it.

Many automatic circuit sizing tools operate directly on netlists and ignore schematics. They can optimize performance, but they weaken designers’ cognitive grasp of the circuit because they strip away the visual and structural representation. Designers lose the intuitive sense of, “If I tweak this here, this behavior changes there.”

Your escalation process likely has the same problem.

You may have:

• A playbook in a wiki (the incident equivalent of a netlist)
• A flowchart someone made once and never updated
• A runbook script that assumes people follow it linearly

What you probably don’t have is a shared, schematic‑like “story map” that shows how incidents actually propagate across teams, systems, and decision points.

And without that, people struggle to reason about:

• Who should do what, when
• Where decisions really live
• How information flows—or fails to flow

To fix this, you need more than better documentation. You need to restore the visual and structural link between the incident and its escalation path.

Human Factors: Designing for Real Brains, Not Ideal Users

Human factors and ergonomics is the discipline of designing tools, processes, and environments that fit real human bodies and minds—not the idealized, always‑alert, perfectly rational user who never gets tired or confused.

Apply that lens to incident escalation and a few truths emerge:

1. People notice issues imperfectly. They may sense “something’s off” long before metrics turn red.
2. People hesitate. They worry about over‑reacting, bothering senior people, or being wrong.
3. People simplify. Under stress, they fall back on the most salient, easily remembered actions.
4. People need cues. Visuals, checklists, and clear authority reduce cognitive load.

Most escalation systems ignore these realities. They assume:

• Everyone reads the runbook
• Everyone remembers the flowchart
• Everyone agrees who owns which decision

A human‑factors aware escalation design does the opposite. It asks:

• How do people actually notice, interpret, and act on problems here?
• Where do they get stuck, second‑guess, or delay?
• What visual, structural, and social cues could help them move faster and more confidently?

This is where the Kitework Atlas comes in.

What Is a “Kitework Atlas” for Incidents?

Think of a Kitework Atlas as a hand‑assembled, schematic‑style map of your incident escalation world—a set of paper flight paths showing how different kinds of issues are supposed to rise, branch, and land.

It’s:

• Analog, not automated – built with whiteboards, sticky notes, and markers before any tool configuration.
• Structural, not just procedural – focused on how information, authority, and responsibility actually connect.
• Story‑driven, not just state‑driven – told as, “When this happens, it travels here, and then they decide that.”

Where a traditional flowchart might say:

IF Severity = SEV1 THEN Notify On‑Call Manager

A Kitework flight path might say:

A customer‑visible outage in Region A triggers a “Red Tail” flight: SRE on call pages Incident Commander, who immediately claims authority over scope, comms, and resource allocation.

The difference is narrative, visibility, and ownership. It’s less about a machine‑readable state diagram, more about a human‑readable story map.

Why Escalations Stall (and How Clear Flight Paths Help)

Incidents rarely stall because no one is technically capable. They stall because of ambiguity and hesitation:

• “Am I allowed to call this a major incident?”
• “Do I really wake the VP?”
• “Who owns this system right now?”
• “Is this security, operations, or product?”

Two design moves dramatically reduce that stall:

1. Define Clear Decision Authorities

Every escalation path should make it obvious:

• Who decides severity
• Who decides scope of response (e.g., rollback, failover, feature flag)
• Who owns external communication
• Who has stop‑the‑line authority

In your Kitework Atlas, these aren’t vague boxes—they’re named roles with explicit powers. Under stress, clarity about authority eliminates permission‑seeking delay.

2. Make Escalation Paths Tangible and Memorably Visual

A list of phone numbers isn’t a path; it’s a directory. A true flight path is:

• Visually distinctive – color‑coded routes for different incident types
• Physically present – printed and posted in war rooms or team spaces
• Rehearsed – walked through in workshops, not just read once in onboarding

When people can literally picture the escalation flight path, they’re far more likely to follow it quickly.

Building Your Analog Flight Paths: A Practical Workshop Pattern

You don’t need sophisticated software to design better escalations. You need deliberate, cross‑functional conversations and some paper.

Here’s a lightweight workshop format to build your Kitework Atlas.

Step 1: Assemble a Cross‑Functional Group

Include:

• Engineers (backend, frontend, SRE/infra)
• Support / customer success
• Security (if applicable)
• Product / operations
• A facilitator who understands incident response

The mix matters. Hidden dependencies and failure modes usually live between functions.

Step 2: Pick 2–3 Incident “Stories”

For each story, choose something concrete, for example:

• A regional outage affecting 20% of traffic
• A suspected credential leak
• A safety‑critical bug in a hardware product

Ask the group: “Walk me through what actually happens from first suspicion to resolution.”

Step 3: Draw the Current Flight Path (No Cleanup)

On a whiteboard or big paper, diagram:

• Signals: How is the issue first noticed? (monitoring, customer complaint, gut feeling)
• First actors: Who sees it? What options do they think they have?
• Branches: Where do people hesitate, ask Slack, or improvise?
• Escalation hops: Who gets pulled in next, and how?

Resist the urge to sanitize. You’re mapping the actual messy netlist of your current process.

Step 4: Identify Stall Points and Failure Modes

Look for:

• Waiting for permission / fear of over‑escalating
• Confusion over who owns which system or decision
• Tool friction (no clear channel, outdated contact info)
• Conflicting or redundant notification paths

Mark these in red. These are where incidents lose altitude.

Step 5: Redesign as a Schematic Story Map

Now, redraw as if you were designing a clean analog schematic:

• Group components into modules (e.g., Detection, Triage, Command, Communications)
• Clarify authorities at each module (who decides what)
• Simplify paths: fewer branches under stress, more defaults (e.g., "if unsure, escalate to X")
• Assign distinct visual identities to different incident classes (colors, shapes, names)

You’re not just fixing steps; you’re rewiring the mental model of how incidents fly.

Step 6: Name the Flight Paths

Give each path a short, memorable name, like:

• Red Tail – customer‑visible outages
• Grey Wing – suspicious security events
• Blue Vector – data integrity risks

These names become cognitive handles: “This smells like a Red Tail—kick off that path.”

Step 7: Socialize, Print, and Rehearse

Turn the redesigned maps into:

• Printed posters for incident rooms and team areas
• One‑page PDFs pinned in your chat tools and runbooks
• Short tabletop exercises where teams read a scenario and trace the flight path

Rehearsal is what cements the schematic into a shared mental model.

Why Analog First, Digital Second

It’s tempting to jump straight to configuring your incident management platform or ticketing workflow. But if you do that before you understand and redesign the analog structure, you end up encoding today’s confusion into tomorrow’s tools.

Analog first gives you:

• Shared understanding: everyone sees the same map and can critique it
• Low‑friction iteration: erasing lines is cheaper than refactoring automation
• Cognitive alignment: the digital workflow later matches the story in people’s heads

Once your Kitework Atlas feels right on paper, then you:

• Implement notification rules that mirror the flight paths
• Align role definitions in your tools with the authority schematic
• Embed links to the visual maps wherever incidents start

The tools become an extension of the atlas—not a substitute for it.

Conclusion: Fly the Routes Before You Need Them

Incidents expose more than system fragility; they expose organizational design. When escalations stall, it’s often because the “netlist” of your process exists in documentation, but the schematic lives in no one’s head.

By borrowing from analog circuit design and human factors, you can:

• Restore a clear visual and structural link between incidents and their escalation paths
• Align workflows with how people actually notice, interpret, and act
• Reduce hesitation through explicit authority and tangible, memorable routes
• Use cross‑functional workshops to surface hidden dependencies and failure modes

A Kitework Atlas is not just a prettier flowchart. It’s a commitment to designing escalation systems for real humans under real pressure, hand‑stitching the paper flight paths your incidents will someday take.

Do the stitching now—before the next issue stalls at low altitude.