The Analog Incident Story Puppet Stage: Reenacting Outages With Paper Characters to Reveal Hidden Roles

Modern incident response is full of dashboards, logs, and automation. But some of the most important dynamics in an outage are invisible to our tools: how people talk to each other, who actually makes decisions, and which unofficial roles emerge under pressure.

One surprisingly powerful way to surface this hidden reality is to go low‑tech.

Enter the Analog Incident Story Puppet Stage: a simple, physical “theater” where teams reenact real outages using paper characters, markers, and tape instead of terminals and test environments.

It sounds playful—and it is—but it’s also a serious, fast, and cheap method to understand how your sociotechnical system really behaves when things go wrong.

Why Act Out Incidents at All?

Most organizations already do some form of postmortem or incident review. These are valuable, but they lean heavily on:

Written timelines (“At 14:32, the database failed over…”)
Technical diagrams (service maps, dependency graphs, architecture diagrams)

What they often miss is the human choreography of an incident:

Who actually took charge—and when?
Who quietly did critical work in the background?
How did information really flow between teams?
Which tools were used as workarounds rather than as designed?

A reenactment lets people inhabit their roles instead of merely describing them. That doesn’t just make the story more vivid; it reveals hidden structure in your incident response: informal leaders, unofficial experts, fragile communication paths, and process gaps.

And with a paper-and-markers puppet stage, you can do this safely, cheaply, and often—without touching production or spinning up costly full‑scale simulations.

What Is an Analog Incident Puppet Stage?

Think of it as a tabletop theater for your outages.

You create a simple “stage” on a table or whiteboard where paper characters stand for:

People (on‑call engineer, SRE, incident commander, customer support, product manager, etc.)
Teams (Payments, Data, Platform, Security)
Systems (API gateway, database cluster, message queue, feature flag service)
External actors (customers, vendors, regulators, third‑party APIs)

Each character is a small cut‑out: an index card, sticky note, or printed icon stuck on a stand or magnet. They can be moved, grouped, connected with arrows, surrounded by “chat bubbles,” or annotated with timestamps.

You then play through an actual incident as a group, or explore a hypothetical “what‑if” failure scenario.

This is not a simulation in the technical sense. Nothing is deployed. No systems are changed. It’s a storytelling reenactment with constraints and roles, closer to:

Customer service scenario practice
Conflict‑resolution role‑plays
Emergency response drills

—but tailored to how your team handles software outages.

Why Low‑Tech Beats High‑Risk

Modern chaos experiments and game days are powerful, but they’re not always practical:

They can be expensive (infra, tooling, prep time)
They may be risky (especially in tightly coupled production systems)
They’re often slow to schedule and run

When live testing is too risky or too costly, the analog puppet stage offers a compelling alternative:

Zero production risk – paper characters can’t take down prod.
Fast to set up and iterate – a few sheets of paper, markers, and 60–90 minutes.
Easy to repeat – you can run several variations or “alternate timelines” in one session.
Inclusive – non‑technical stakeholders (support, operations, product, legal) can fully participate.

You’re not replacing live testing entirely; you’re adding a low‑friction practice space where people can build skills and insight between larger exercises.

How a Puppet Stage Session Works

Here’s a simple structure you can use.

1. Choose the Story (or Scenario)

Pick one of:

A real past incident you want to understand better
A plausible failure mode you’re worried about but can’t easily test in production
A "what‑if" branch of a known incident (e.g., “What if the incident commander had been in a different time zone?”)

Define a clear starting moment: “An alert fired for elevated latency on the checkout API.”

2. Build the Cast of Characters

On paper cards, write or draw:

Individual roles: On‑call SRE, Database Engineer, Incident Commander, Support Agent, PR Lead, Vendor Contact
Systems: Checkout API, Payments DB, Feature Flag Service, Monitoring, Slack
Contextual actors: Enterprise Customer, Regulator, Status Page

Don’t stress about artistic quality. Legible names and simple icons are enough.

Place them on the table or board in a rough layout: systems in one area, teams in another, customers on an edge.

3. Assign Participants to Roles

Invite attendees to play themselves or others:

Someone plays the on‑call engineer
Someone plays the incident commander
Someone else might play Monitoring or Status Page as a kind of narrator

If you’re reenacting a real incident, invite some of the original participants. They can correct or fill in details as the story unfolds.

4. Reenact the Incident as a Story

Walk through the timeline:

Trigger: “At 14:32, the alert fires.” Move the Monitoring card, add a chat bubble: “High latency on /checkout.”
Detection & Triage: Who sees it? Move that person’s card; draw a line to the alert tool.
Escalations: Who is paged next? Move cards, add arrows.
Communication: When does the incident channel open? Who joins? Represent Slack or Zoom as characters; connect people to them.
Decisions & Actions: Track key actions as sticky notes placed near systems or people.
External Contacts: When do customers, support, or executives get involved? Move those cards into the scene.

Encourage participants to speak as their characters:

“I’m the on‑call SRE; I acknowledge the alert and check the dashboard.”
“I’m support; I notice a spike in tickets right before the alert.”

This role‑play style rehearses incident response skills in a low‑stakes environment and makes subtle coordination issues much more visible.

5. Pause, Reflect, Branch

At any point, you can pause and ask:

“Who is missing from this picture right now?”
“Who is doing invisible work that isn’t on the board?”
“What information is stuck in one place and not reaching others?”

Then explore branches:

“What if the on‑call didn’t see the alert for 10 minutes?”
“What if the database engineer wasn’t available?”
“What if we had auto‑remediation enabled here?”

Move paper characters to match those alternate timelines. Each branch becomes a micro‑experiment: a way to test how fragile or robust your current setup is—without breaking anything.

Revealing Hidden Roles and Communication Paths

The real power of the puppet stage is what it exposes that your diagrams and timelines rarely show.

Hidden Roles

Often you’ll discover:

A Slack “note‑taker” who becomes the de facto historian
A senior engineer who acts as an unofficial incident commander
A support lead quietly triaging and summarizing customer impact without being formally recognized
A tool (like an internal dashboard) acting as a rallying point even though it’s not mentioned in the runbook

Placing these as visible characters on the stage gives you a chance to ask:

Should this be a formal role?
Does this person have the support and training they need?
Is our documented process describing what actually happens—or an outdated ideal?

Communication and Coordination Gaps

By drawing arrows and chat bubbles, you’ll often notice:

Critical updates only flowing through one person
Teams that should coordinate but never interact directly
Delays introduced by unclear ownership of a system or decision

These are hard to spot in a log file, but obvious when you see all your paper characters clustered around one overwhelmed person or tool.

Treating Reenactments as Experiments

Each puppet stage session can be framed as an experiment:

Hypothesis: “If we assign an explicit incident commander earlier, we reduce confusion and duplicate work.”
Intervention: Run the same scenario twice—once with ad‑hoc leadership, once with a clearly designated commander from the first alert.
Observation: Note differences in who speaks, how decisions are made, and when customers hear from you.

You can do the same for:

Adding a status page update rule
Introducing a rotation for communications lead
Changing escalation rules or team boundaries

You can also explore rare or extreme scenarios that would be too risky to intentionally create:

Simultaneous failures in multiple regions
A critical vendor outage during peak traffic
An incident starting right before a regulatory deadline

Because it’s all paper and discussion, you can drift into highly unlikely but informative territory—“What if this happened on a holiday?”—and learn a lot without any operational risk.

Practical Tips for Getting Started

Keep it small at first. Pilot with one or two teams and a single, well‑understood incident.
Timebox sessions. Aim for 60–90 minutes: 30–45 to reenact, 30–45 to reflect and extract improvements.
Designate a facilitator. Someone neutral to keep time, prompt reflection, and ensure everyone speaks.
Capture insights visibly. Use a separate board or color of sticky notes for: “New role?”, “Ownership unclear”, “Communication gap”, “Process mismatch”.
End with concrete actions. Turn insights into small experiments: update a runbook, clarify a role, tweak escalation policy, or plan a future chaos test.

Conclusion: Serious Learning in a Playful Format

A puppet stage full of paper characters might look like a toy, but it’s a powerful lens on your real, high‑stakes work.

By replaying incidents analog‑style, you:

Create a safe, low‑stakes practice space for incident response skills.
Surface hidden roles, responsibilities, and communication paths that written postmortems miss.
Gain a cheap, fast alternative to live simulations when they’re too risky or slow.
Make complex sociotechnical interactions visible, not just their technical outputs.
Treat each reenactment as an experiment, exploring rare failure modes and what‑ifs you may never otherwise see.

In a world obsessed with more tools and more data, sometimes the most revealing move is to step back, pick up a marker, and put your system on a stage. The paper characters won’t fix your outages for you—but they’ll show you where to start.