The Analog Incident Story Puppet Stage: Acting Out Outages Before They Go Live

If your only plan for a major outage or cyberattack is "we’ll figure it out when it happens," you’re gambling with your business.

Modern systems are complex, tightly coupled, and fragile in surprising ways. When incidents strike—ransomware, DDoS, data leak, or a critical SaaS outage—your team doesn’t just need technical skill. They need coordination. They need clarity. And they need practice.

That’s where the Analog Incident Story Puppet Stage comes in: a low-tech, high-impact way to run tabletop exercises, using paper characters and a “puppet show” style to act out outages before they go live.

This isn’t childish play. It’s a powerful, low-risk format to stress-test your incident response plan, surface hidden assumptions, and make sure everyone knows their role when things go sideways.

What Is a Tabletop Exercise (and Why Go Analog)?

A tabletop exercise is a structured, discussion-based simulation of a real-world incident. Instead of breaking production or running a full-blown red-team engagement, you:

Walk through a realistic scenario step by step
Ask participants what they would do at each point
Observe how decisions, communications, and procedures play out

The goal isn’t to "win" the game; it’s to expose gaps in your incident response capability—before an attacker does.

So why use an analog, puppet-stage approach?

Low risk: No changes to live systems. No risk of accidental outages while “practicing.”
Low friction: You can run it in a meeting room with printouts and sticky notes. No special tools required.
High engagement: Visual, tangible “paper characters” make roles and decisions explicit, keeping participants focused.
Safe to fail: People are more willing to experiment, make mistakes, and admit uncertainty when it’s clearly a simulation.

Think of it as a story-driven rehearsal where your IT and security teams, business stakeholders, and clients practice working together under pressure—without the real-world cost of downtime.

The Foundation: A Clear Incident Response Plan

A puppet stage without a script is just chaos. To get value from these exercises, you need a clear, documented incident response plan. At minimum, it should define:

1. Incident Classification

How do you categorize what’s happening? For example:

Severity levels (SEV-1/2/3, Critical/Major/Minor)
Types of incidents (security breach, service outage, performance degradation, data loss)

Clear classification:

Prioritizes response effort
Triggers the right playbooks
Clarifies when to escalate and who to involve

2. Communication Protocols

In an incident, communication can save you—or sink you. Your plan should spell out:

Who communicates with customers or clients
Who updates internal stakeholders and executives
Channels to use (email, chat, status page, ticketing system)
Frequency and format of updates (e.g., “every 30 minutes, short written status”)

3. Technical Procedures

Your plan doesn’t have to cover every possible detail, but it should include:

Standard steps for triage and initial investigation
Criteria and processes for containment and isolation
Procedures for eradication (removing malware, closing vulnerabilities)
Steps for recovery and validation

This plan becomes both:

The basis for your exercise scenarios
The yardstick to measure whether the team actually follows it under simulated pressure

Casting the Characters: Roles and Responsibilities

In real incidents, confusion about "Who’s doing what?" burns time and trust. That’s why defining roles and responsibilities in advance is non-negotiable.

Typical roles might include:

Incident Commander – Owns the response, prioritizes actions, and ensures decisions are made.
Technical Lead(s) – Investigate root cause, coordinate remediation, and manage changes.
Communications Lead – Handles internal/external messages, status updates, client communication.
Security Lead – Evaluates security implications, hunts for related threats, coordinates with legal/compliance when needed.
Scribe / Documentation Lead – Captures timeline, decisions, and actions for later review.
Business / Product Owner – Represents customer impact and business priorities.

In the Analog Incident Story Puppet Stage, you turn each of these into a paper character:

Print a small card with the role name, a short description, and maybe a fun avatar or icon.
Hand each card to a participant.
That participant is now responsible for that role’s decisions in the exercise.

This makes responsibilities tangible and prevents the all-too-common: “I thought someone else was doing that.”

Setting the Stage: Building Your Puppet-Style Simulation

You don’t need fancy software to build a realistic exercise. A simple analog setup can look like this:

Storyboard the Scenario
Create a timeline of events:
- T+0: Monitoring alert triggers.
- T+10: Customer support tickets start spiking.
- T+30: Suspicious logs suggest a possible breach.
- T+60: Press inquiry arrives.
Each “beat” becomes a scene in your analog story.
Prepare Event Cards
Write each event on a card:
- What new information appears
- What constraints exist (e.g., “Legal says you can’t disclose X yet”)
- Optional: inject twists or conflicting data to mimic reality
Lay Out the Environment
On a whiteboard or wall, define areas such as:
- “Monitoring & Alerts”
- “Systems & Services”
- “Customers & Stakeholders”
- “Decisions & Actions”
Use sticky notes to represent systems, services, or teams.
Assign Roles (Paper Characters)
Each participant:
- Receives their role card
- Reads their responsibilities
- Introduces themselves in-role to the group
Run the Story
The facilitator:
- Reveals one event card at a time
- Asks: “Incident Commander, what’s your move?”
- Prompts others: “Communications, what do you tell customers?”
- Records decisions as sticky notes in the “Decisions & Actions” area

The analog, puppet-stage style keeps things concrete and visual: people can literally see the incident unfold.

Practicing the Hard Parts: Decisions, Mistakes, and Miscommunications

The true value of acting out outages isn’t validating your “happy path” response. It’s safely exploring what goes wrong:

Delayed escalation: Does the team recognize when a minor issue is becoming a major incident?
Conflicting priorities: How do technical teams, business owners, and communications resolve tradeoffs?
Information gaps: What happens when logs are incomplete or signals are ambiguous?
Misaligned messaging: Does internal communication match what’s being told to customers?

In a low-risk, paper-based format, you can:

Pause and rewind: “Let’s go back five minutes. What if we did X instead?”
Try alternative approaches: “What if we quarantined this system earlier?”
Call out confusion without blame: “It seems we weren’t sure who talks to legal—why?”

The goal isn’t perfection; it’s learning. Every misstep in the exercise is one you’re less likely to repeat in production.

From Practice to Preparedness: Improving Containment and Eradication

Rehearsing scenarios isn’t only about communication; it directly improves your technical response.

Through regular, scenario-based practice, your development and operations teams can:

Refine containment strategies: When do you isolate a host vs. shut down a service? How do you minimize blast radius while keeping critical functionality?
Improve eradication playbooks: What’s the step-by-step process to remove an attacker’s foothold? How do you validate that they’re truly gone?
Identify tooling gaps: In the exercise, do people wish they had faster log access, better dashboards, or automated runbooks?
Clarify handoffs: When does the on-call engineer hand control to an incident commander or security team?

By repeating exercises with different scenarios—ransomware, cloud misconfiguration, insider threat, third-party vendor outage—you build a library of institutional knowledge and patterns for response.

Over time, your analog puppet stage becomes a kind of flight simulator for incidents: a place to practice rare but high-stakes emergencies until they feel familiar.

Facilitating Better: Use a Structured Guidebook or Framework

To avoid ad-hoc chaos, IT service providers and internal teams benefit from a structured guidebook or framework to run these exercises. A good guide typically includes:

Scenario templates (e.g., "Ransomware in the ERP System," "Misconfigured S3 Bucket Exposing Data")
Step-by-step facilitator instructions
Checklists for pre-brief and debrief
Role descriptions and sample paper characters
Evaluation criteria (communication clarity, adherence to plan, speed of key decisions)

Using a consistent framework helps you:

Deliver immersive, realistic simulations to both internal teams and external clients
Track improvement across multiple exercises over time
Ensure each session isn’t just “interesting” but measurably useful

For managed service providers (MSPs) or security consultancies, this kind of repeatable, analog exercise can become a core service offering—helping clients prove, not just claim, that they’re ready for incidents.

Turning Lessons into Action

A tabletop exercise that ends with “That was fun, goodbye” wastes its potential. The most critical phase is the post-exercise review:

Replay the timeline: What happened when? Who decided what?
Identify strengths: Where did the team respond quickly or communicate clearly?
Highlight gaps: Missing contacts? Unclear ownership? Outdated runbooks?
Assign follow-ups: Create concrete tasks with owners and deadlines:
- Update incident response plan
- Clarify or adjust roles
- Improve logging/monitoring
- Draft or refine communication templates

Every exercise should leave behind:

A sharper incident response plan
Better prepared people
Clear improvements to systems and processes

Conclusion: Practice in Paper, Perform in Production

You can’t prevent every outage or cyber incident. But you can decide whether your response is chaotic improvisation—or a practiced performance.

The Analog Incident Story Puppet Stage approach brings incident response out of dense PDFs and into a shared, physical space where teams can:

Experiment and fail safely
Clarify roles and communication
Refine containment and eradication strategies
Build confidence long before a real attacker shows up

By combining structured incident response planning with regular, analog tabletop exercises, you turn paper characters and imagined crises into real-world readiness.

Better to act out your next outage on a puppet stage today than on your production systems tomorrow.