Introduction

Most teams treat incident reviews as a necessary chore: fill out a postmortem template, paste in some graphs, agree on action items, move on. The result is often a tidy document that captures what happened—but not why similar incidents keep happening.

Digital tools are excellent at storing and querying information, but they’re not always great at helping people see patterns and systems. That’s where a surprising ally can help: paper.

This post explores the idea of an Analog Incident Story Puzzle Cabinet—a physical, modular way of arranging incident components (like causes, impacts, and mitigations) on paper tiles. By turning incidents into a tactile, rearrangeable puzzle, teams can reveal hidden reliability patterns that might stay invisible inside static documents and dashboards.

Why Standardized Postmortems Aren’t Enough (But Still Essential)

Standardized incident postmortem templates are already a step in the right direction. They:

• Enforce consistent fields (e.g., impact, root cause(s), timeline, mitigations, follow-up actions)
• Make it easier to compare incidents side by side
• Help new team members quickly understand how the organization talks about reliability

More importantly, these templates create a shared vocabulary for reliability: we talk about causes in similar ways, describe impacts with similar frames, and identify mitigations with common structures.

However, even the best structured template has limits:

• Incidents live in silos—as individual documents or tickets
• Cross-incident patterns remain hard to see
• Complexity is flattened into bullet points instead of explored as a system

The key is to keep the standardized templates, but then lift their contents out—physically—so they can be rearranged, remixed, and remapped.

Enter the paper tiles.

Making Reliability Tangible with Paper Tiles

Digital tools tend to feel abstract: rows in a database, filters in a UI, unreadable wall-of-text timelines. Physical, analog formats can make reliability work more concrete and collaborative.

Imagine the output of your postmortem template cut into paper tiles, each representing one piece of the incident story:

• Incident title tiles
• Cause tiles (e.g., “Config flag X defaulted to unsafe value,” “Missing rate limiting on endpoint /v2/report”)
• Impact tiles (e.g., “User checkout failures,” “Data staleness for 23% of reads,” “SLO violation on p95 latency”)
• Contributing factor tiles (e.g., “On-call unfamiliar with subsystem,” “Alert fatigue from noisy alarms”)
• Mitigation tiles (e.g., “Added circuit breaker,” “Improved runbook for database failover”)
• Follow-up tiles (e.g., “Add test coverage around throttling,” “Refine escalation policy”)

These tiles are laid out on a table or whiteboard. Teams can:

• Move causes next to similar causes across incidents
• Group impacts by affected user journeys
• Cluster mitigations that attack the same systemic weakness

The physicality matters. People pick up a tile, turn it around, argue about its category, stick it somewhere else. That simple act shifts incident review from reading documents to collaboratively modeling a system.

The “Puzzle Cabinet” Approach: Beams, Pillars, and Adjustable Frames

To make this repeatable, think of your analog setup as a modular puzzle cabinet—inspired by modular engineering concepts:

• Beams: Horizontal rows or tracks where tiles representing a given category live (e.g., top beam for “Impacts,” middle for “Causes,” bottom for “Mitigations”).
• Pillars: Vertical groupings that connect related tiles across categories (e.g., one pillar per incident, or one pillar per shared theme).
• Adjustable height: The ability to “zoom” in or out by adding or removing levels of detail (e.g., high-level cause vs. detailed contributing factors).

Think of each incident as a modular unit that can plug into different lenses:

• By incident: All tiles (causes, impacts, mitigations) arranged in a single column tell one coherent story.
• By theme: Causes from many incidents are regrouped into new columns (e.g., “Monitoring gaps,” “Release process issues,” “Dependency instability”).
• By lifecycle: Tiles are rearranged to show before, during, and after dynamics across incidents.

This cabinet-like structure can live on a wall, a corkboard, or a rolling whiteboard. Over time, it becomes a living library of reliability stories that you can refactor and rebuild as your understanding of the system evolves.

Treating Incidents as a Systems Map, Not Isolated Failures

Most postmortems focus narrowly on a single incident. But your systems—and your organization—operate as a set of interconnected feedback loops.

When you treat incident data as a systems map, you naturally start asking questions like:

• What keeps showing up together?
• Which causes connect to multiple different impacts?
• Where do mitigations keep addressing symptoms, not underlying structures?

Using the puzzle cabinet, you can build simple but powerful systems views:

1. Cause-to-impact chains
   Draw arrows or use string between cause tiles and impact tiles. Clusters of string point to systemic fragility.

2. Shared contributing factors
   Mark tiles with colored stickers (e.g., blue for process, red for technical debt, green for organizational). Suddenly, you see where non-technical factors dominate.

3. Feedback loops
   For example: “Alert fatigue → Slow response → Wider blast radius → More alerts → Increased fatigue.” Even a hand-drawn loop next to a cluster of tiles can shift the conversation from blame to structure.

The goal isn’t to build a formal, academic systems diagram. It’s to see the web instead of isolated nodes.

Turning Systems Thinking into a Game-Like Exercise

Systems mapping can intimidate people. The language (“stocks and flows,” “reinforcing loops”) sounds theoretical and remote from the daily fire drills of on-call.

Analog, game-like exercises make it accessible:

• Card sorting: Ask participants to sort cause tiles into piles: “similar,” “unrelated,” “not sure.” The discussions during sorting are more valuable than the final piles.
• Pattern hunt rounds: Give small groups 10–15 minutes to find:
  • Three recurring impact patterns
  • Two repeated contributing factors
  • One mitigation that appears in more than three incidents
• What-if puzzles: Remove one tile (e.g., a specific mitigation or process control) and ask, “How many other tiles would this change?” That’s an intuitive way to explore leverage points.

These exercises lower the stakes. Instead of “We have to analyze systemic risk,” it becomes “Let’s see what shapes we can find if we move these pieces around.” Learning and curiosity replace defensiveness and blame.

Bridging Digital Incident Tools with Analog Mapping

This isn’t about abandoning your incident management tools; it’s about augmenting them.

Here’s how to connect the two worlds:

1. Start digital, then go analog

   • Use your existing incident tools to capture standardized postmortems.
   • Export key fields into a simple CSV.
   • Print or write those onto tiles (or sticky notes) to bring to a mapping session.

2. Annotate analog, then go back digital

   • During the puzzle cabinet exercise, you’ll discover new themes (e.g., “approval bottlenecks,” “overloaded team X,” “ambiguous ownership”).
   • Capture these as new tags or fields in your incident tool so they persist and can be queried.

3. Create a feedback loop

   • Use insights from the analog sessions to refine your postmortem template itself.
   • For example, add structured fields for “Organizational contributing factors” or “Known related incidents.”
   • Over time, your digital data becomes richer, making future analog mapping more powerful.

4. Codify recurring patterns

   • When the same structure appears over and over (say, “late detection due to lack of user-centric monitoring”), define it as a named pattern in your reliability playbook.
   • Link incidents in the tool that exhibit that pattern.
   • In your next analog session, you can lay out tiles by pattern name.

The analog work drives better structure in the digital tools; the digital tools supply raw material for deeper analog insight.

Practical Steps to Try This With Your Team

You don’t need a fancy setup. Here’s a minimal viable Incident Story Puzzle Cabinet you can run in a single workshop:

1. Choose 3–5 incidents from the last quarter.
2. Extract key fields from each postmortem: causes, impacts, contributing factors, mitigations.
3. Create tiles using index cards or sticky notes. One item per card.
4. On a whiteboard or wall, draw three horizontal bands: Impacts (top), Causes/Factors (middle), Mitigations (bottom).
5. Place incident tiles in columns—one column per incident—to tell individual stories.
6. After everyone reviews the incidents, rearrange tiles collaboratively:
   • Group similar causes together across incidents.
   • Cluster shared impacts.
   • Identify recurring mitigations and label them.
7. Discuss patterns and surprises: What themes emerge that never show up in individual postmortems?
8. Capture insights back into your digital tools and reliability roadmap.

Run this quarterly, and your wall will gradually become a visual, evolving memory of how your systems and organization behave under stress.

Conclusion

Incidents are stories about how complex systems—and the people running them—interact under pressure. Standardized postmortem templates give those stories structure, but they often flatten complexity and hide cross-incident patterns.

By turning incident components into analog puzzle pieces—assembled in a modular, cabinet-like structure—you invite teams to:

• Touch and rearrange reliability concepts
• See systems and feedback loops instead of isolated failures
• Lower the barrier to systems thinking with game-like exercises
• Bridge the strengths of digital tools with the creativity of physical mapping

The Analog Incident Story Puzzle Cabinet isn’t about arts and crafts for their own sake. It’s a deliberate way to make reliability patterns visible, tangible, and collaboratively understood—so your organization can respond not just to the last incident, but to the system that keeps generating them.