The Analog Incident Story Maze Drawer: Hand‑Building Paper Escape Routes from Recurring Outages

Recurring outages feel like being trapped in a maze you’ve already solved—but can’t quite remember the way out of. You recognize the corridors, the dead ends, the panic in Slack, the late‑night dashboards… and yet, somehow, you’re back here again.

This is where the idea of an Analog Incident Story Maze Drawer comes in: a deliberately low‑tech, paper‑based way to capture, analyze, and rehearse your way out of these recurring outage mazes. It’s not about nostalgia for office supplies; it’s about slowing down enough to really understand your failures, and building a physical archive of how to escape them.

In this post, we’ll explore how to build that drawer using three complementary tools:

Blameless postmortems – to learn from the past
Tabletop exercises – to rehearse the future
Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) – to see the whole maze at once

Used together, they create a practical, repeatable way to turn incidents into maps instead of mysteries.

Why Recurring Outages Are a Symptom, Not a Fluke

When production keeps breaking in similar ways, it’s rarely bad luck or one person’s mistake. It’s a signal:

Your system design has weak points
Your processes are fragile or incomplete
Your culture might be optimized for speed, not learning

Patching the immediate symptom—restarting a service, rolling back a deploy, adding a quick guardrail—may restore availability. But when the same type of outage returns, it shows you’re treating incidents as fires to extinguish, not stories to understand.

Recurring incidents are the universe’s way of saying:

“You don’t have a one‑off problem. You have a systemic one.”

The analog story maze drawer is how you capture and analyze those systemic patterns over time.

Blameless Postmortems: Turning Outages into Stories, Not Trials

The first tool in your drawer is the blameless postmortem.

A blameless postmortem is an incident review that:

Focuses on what happened, not who messed up
Treats people as sources of insight, not targets of blame
Aims to increase system resilience, not enforce fear‑based compliance

Why “Blameless” Matters

If engineers fear punishment or reputation damage:

Details get glossed over
Risky but important context is hidden
People optimize for self‑protection, not organizational learning

Without psychological safety, your postmortem becomes theater. You get a timeline, a few shallow “root causes,” and a list of action items that quietly evaporate.

With blamelessness at the core, your postmortems can instead:

Reveal how tools, docs, and processes shaped decisions
Surface conflicting incentives (e.g., ship faster vs. test better)
Highlight gaps in observability, runbooks, or ownership

What to Capture on Paper

For your analog drawer, print or write out a structured postmortem narrative for each incident:

Story title – A human‑readable name (e.g., The Cache Stampede Friday Night Fiasco)
Context – What was happening in the business and system at the time
Timeline – Events, signals, decisions, and communications
Contributing factors – Multiple, interlocking causes, not a single “root cause” scapegoat
Impact – On users, SLOs, revenue, and teams
Learnings – What surprised you? What didn’t behave as designed?
Follow‑ups – Concrete, owner‑assigned improvements

Then label and file it. Each postmortem becomes one chapter in your maze atlas.

Tabletop Exercises: Rehearsing Escapes Before You’re Trapped

If postmortems help you understand the mazes you’ve already walked, incident response tabletop exercises help you practice navigating them before they happen again.

A tabletop exercise is a guided simulation where:

You walk through a plausible incident scenario
Team members talk through what they’d do, step by step
You stress‑test communication, roles, tools, and runbooks—without impacting production

Think of it as a flight simulator for your on‑call team.

Why Tabletop Exercises Matter for Recurring Outages

Recurring incidents often expose:

Unclear on‑call roles and authority
Messy or incomplete runbooks
Fragile cross‑team communication
Misaligned expectations about severity and escalation

Tabletops let you:

Re‑run historical incidents with new approaches
Introduce new failure modes based on what you’ve learned
Build muscle memory for effective, calm, coordinated response

Use a Repeatable Template

To make tabletops more than occasional theater, use a standard template:

Scenario description – Based on a real or plausible outage
Initial symptoms – What the on‑call sees first
Available tools – Dashboards, logs, runbooks
Roles – Incident commander, communications lead, subject‑matter experts
Key decision points – Roll back? Page another team? Declare SEV‑1?
Injects – New twists mid‑exercise (e.g., a misleading alert, a second concurrent incident)
Outcomes & gaps – What worked well, what was missing, what surprised you

After each tabletop, print and file the results next to the related postmortems. Over time, your drawer will contain not just what went wrong, but also how you practiced making it right.

Fault Tree Analysis: Seeing the Maze from Above

Postmortems and tabletop exercises are narrative and experiential. Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) gives you a structural, logical view of how failures combine.

FTA starts from a top event—for example: “Checkout API unavailable for >10 minutes”—and works downward:

Identify the immediate causes of that outage (e.g., service crash, DB overload, misrouted traffic)
Break each cause into more specific contributing conditions
Use logical connectors like AND / OR to show when combinations are required

On paper, it looks like an inverted tree or a branching flowchart of failure.

Why FTA Helps with Recurring Outages

FTA:

Reveals common failure paths across different incidents
Shows where single points of failure or risky combinations exist
Makes it easier to prioritize improvements with the biggest impact

For example, you might notice that wildly different incidents all depend on:

The same shared configuration service, or
A fragile manual deployment checklist, or
A single overloaded database cluster

Mapping that with FTA turns isolated stories into a coherent system map of how you get trapped in the same maze.

Print and store each fault tree alongside its related incident narratives.

Assembling the Analog Incident Story Maze Drawer

You don’t need fancy tools to start. You need:

A drawer (or folder system)
Paper, pens, and a printer
A willingness to take your failures seriously enough to memorialize them

Organize your drawer into three primary sections:

Incident Stories (Postmortems)
- Chronologically ordered, with tags (services, components, teams)
Practice Runs (Tabletop Templates & Results)
- Scenario descriptions, decisions, and identified gaps
Maze Maps (Fault Trees & Diagrams)
- Visual breakdowns of how failures combine

How to Use the Drawer Over Time

At the start of a new incident:
- Skim prior incidents with similar symptoms
- Review corresponding fault trees and playbooks
When planning improvements:
- Look for recurring contributors across multiple incidents
- Prioritize structural fixes that simplify your fault trees
When onboarding engineers:
- Use selected incidents and tabletops as training material
- Show them not just how the system works—but how it has failed

The drawer becomes your analog memory: a curated archive of pain that you don’t want to forget.

Culture: The Real Escape Route

Processes and diagrams alone won’t free you from outage mazes. The real leverage comes from culture:

Curiosity over defensiveness – “Why did this make sense at the time?” not “Who approved this?”
Learning over punishment – Rewarding honest reporting and deep analysis
Follow‑through over theater – Tracking and actually completing improvement actions

Blameless postmortems, tabletop exercises, and FTA are rituals that reinforce that culture. The analog drawer is the physical reminder that:

Incidents are inevitable, but
Repeating the same ones is optional—if you’re willing to learn

Conclusion: Make Your Mazes Visible, Then Walk Out Together

Recurring outages mean you’re stuck in a maze you don’t fully understand.

By combining:

Blameless postmortems to tell honest stories of failure
Tabletop exercises to rehearse better responses
Fault Tree Analysis to see how failures combine at the system level

…and by capturing it all in an Analog Incident Story Maze Drawer, you:

Turn chaos into narratives and diagrams
Turn shame into shared learning
Turn recurring outages into rare, well‑understood events

You may still find yourself in a maze now and then. But you’ll have a map, a team that’s practiced using it, and a drawer full of stories showing you exactly how to walk your way out.