The Analog Incident Story Tide Clock: A Wall-Sized Paper Gauge for Knowing When Your Risk Is Coming In—or Going Out

Most organizations have no shortage of risk data: dashboards, heat maps, risk registers, vendor scores, incident timelines, and board packs. Yet during a real incident, leaders still end up asking the same basic questions:

• How bad is this—really?
• Is risk getting better or worse right now?
• Who’s on it, and what do they need?
• What do we tell customers and executives—in plain language?

This gap between data and shared understanding is why I’m a fan of a deceptively simple device: an Analog Incident Story Tide Clock—a wall-sized paper gauge that shows whether your risk is “coming in” or “going out,” and tells the story of the incident as it unfolds.

Think of it as a human-readable overlay on top of your modern, AI-powered incident stack—a way to align technical responders, business leaders, and risk owners around the same, simple narrative.

Modern Incident Management: Powerful, but Often Incomprehensible to Non-Engineers

Today’s best incident platforms are incredibly capable. They combine:

• AI-powered investigation to correlate logs, alerts, and metrics and suggest likely root causes.
• Integrated on-call scheduling so the right specialists are paged instantly.
• Intelligent alert routing to reduce noise and ensure critical signals reach the right teams.
• Chat-native collaboration so incidents are run in Slack or Teams, with timelines automatically captured.
• Public and internal status pages to keep customers and stakeholders up to date.
• Automated post-incident insights that summarize what happened and what should improve.

These capabilities are crucial for reducing Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR). But they don’t automatically solve the hardest alignment problem:

How do we keep everyone—from SREs to legal, from the SOC to the CEO—on the same page about what’s happening right now and what it means for risk?

This is where the Analog Incident Story Tide Clock comes in.

The Analog Incident Story Tide Clock: What It Is

Picture a big sheet of paper on the wall of your war room (or virtual equivalent, shared in a digital whiteboard). It has three core elements:

1. A giant tide gauge – a semicircle or vertical track labeled from “Low Tide” (risk receding) to “High Tide” (peak risk)”.
2. A movable pointer – a sticky note or magnet that you physically move as the incident evolves.
3. Story bands – horizontal lanes for short, timestamped notes:
   • What’s happening technically (symptoms, suspected causes)
   • Impact to customers and business (what’s actually at risk)
   • Decisions & actions taken (what we decided, who owns it)

Every 10–15 minutes, the incident commander (IC) or designated “storyteller” updates the clock:

• Moves the pointer up or down based on real-world risk.
• Adds a few plain-language notes in each lane.

It’s analog on purpose.

• No color-coded debates
• No five-level likelihood scales
• No arguments about whether something is a 3 or a 4 on an arbitrary matrix

Just one essential question:

Is the risk coming in (tide rising) or going out (tide receding)? And what’s the story behind that move?

Why You Need a “Tide Clock” When You Already Have Dashboards

When evaluating incident management platforms, teams often focus on feature checklists and MTTR reduction. That matters—but it’s incomplete.

A more powerful question is:

Does this platform help us tell a clear, shared story of the incident—fast enough for both technical and business stakeholders to act confidently?

A tide clock helps you:

1. Bridge technical and business language
   Engineers speak in error rates and database failovers. Executives care about revenue impact, regulatory exposure, and customer trust. The tide clock forces translation: every movement of the pointer must be justified in terms everyone understands.

2. Avoid metric myopia
   Dashboards show telemetry; the tide clock shows consequence. You move the pointer only when something materially changes for customers, operations, or risk posture.

3. Keep everyone synchronized in time
   Incidents can feel chaotic. The story bands create a temporal spine: what we knew, when we knew it, and what we did. This is pure gold for both live coordination and post-incident reviews.

Used together, your digital platform reduces MTTR and correlates technical signals; your analog tide clock ensures your organization actually understands what’s happening.

The Risk Trap: When Management Becomes Bureaucracy

Many organizations treat risk management as a bureaucratic obligation rather than a decision-support discipline. You see symptoms like:

• Endless heat maps that get updated quarterly and then ignored.
• Bloated risk registers that serve as static repositories instead of action queues.
• Board meetings where half the time is wasted arguing about colors—is this “amber” or “red”?—instead of debating strategic tradeoffs.

This over-focus on visuals and categorization creates an illusion of control without real impact. Worse, it can:

• Stall innovation by making every new idea feel like a compliance gauntlet.
• Erode trust between risk teams and the business (“they just slow us down”).
• Slow decisions when leaders are unsure whether the beautiful dashboards map to reality.
• Create cultural fatigue—people disengage from risk discussions because they feel performative.

A tide clock is a deliberate counterweight to this. It says:

Risk is not a color on a slide. It’s a changing story we have to understand together, in real time.

Extending the Tide Clock to Third-Party Risk

The same thinking applies to third-party risk management (TPRM).

A well-designed TPRM dashboard should:

• Show which vendors matter most to critical services.
• Track incident exposure: where third-party failures intersect your systems.
• Highlight concentration risk and single points of failure.

But again, the risk is turning this into another static heat map—vendors colored red, amber, green and then forgotten.

Adding a TPRM “tide clock” view changes the conversation:

• When a cloud provider has an outage, you move the vendor tide pointer up and annotate: “Potential impact to customer logins in EU; failover in progress.”
• When a SaaS security partner is under active investigation, you track the risk tide as the story develops: “Vendor confirms no data exfiltration; monitoring continues for 48 hours.”

Now your TPRM dashboard is no longer just a catalog of vendor statuses—it becomes a decision-enabling tool, tied to live operational risk.

How to Build Your Own Analog Incident Story Tide Clock

You can implement this in under an hour.

1. Draw the Tide Gauge

On a whiteboard, poster, or virtual canvas, create a scale like:

• Low tide – No active incident / risk well-controlled
• Rising tide – Incident identified; impact possible or limited
• High tide – Confirmed impact; elevated business or regulatory risk
• Turning – Containment in place, risk stabilizing
• Receding tide – Remediation working; residual risk only

Avoid numbers; use words that describe how people should feel and act.

2. Add Story Bands

Create three or four horizontal lanes:

1. Technical reality – What we’re seeing in systems.
2. Customer & business impact – What’s happening to users, revenue, obligations.
3. Decisions & mitigations – What we’ve chosen to do and why.
4. (Optional) External communication – What we’ve told customers, regulators, media.

3. Assign a “Tide Keeper” During Incidents

The incident commander owns the pointer. Every 10–15 minutes, they:

• Move it up or down—or leave it in place.
• Add 1–3 bullet points in each lane, in plain English.

This rhythm forces:

• Clear articulation of why the tide is moving.
• Shared understanding across disciplines.
• Natural checkpoints for executive and stakeholder briefings.

4. Integrate With Your Digital Stack

The tide clock doesn’t replace tools; it orchestrates them.

• Use your incident platform for paging, chat coordination, and AI-assisted triage.
• Expose the tide position in your internal status page or executive updates.
• At the end, use the tide clock artifacts as the spine of your post-incident review.

From Rituals to Real Decisions

A wall-sized paper tide clock may sound almost comically low-tech compared to AI-driven incident platforms and sophisticated TPRM dashboards. That’s exactly the point.

• It strips risk management back to shared situational awareness.
• It turns abstract risk categories into a living narrative.
• It disciplines teams to focus on outcomes over process.

When the next major incident hits, your organization doesn’t need more heat maps or red-amber-green debates. It needs a clear answer to one question:

Is the risk tide coming in or going out—and what story are we telling about it?

Combine the Analog Incident Story Tide Clock with modern incident tooling, and you get the best of both worlds: fast, AI-accelerated diagnosis and coordination, anchored by a human-readable story that keeps everyone aligned—from the engineer on call to the board.

That’s how risk management stops being bureaucracy and becomes what it was always meant to be: a way to make better, faster, more confident decisions when it matters most.