The Analog Incident Storyboard Wall: Turning Production Outages into Frame‑by‑Frame Paper Comics

When production goes down, the last thing most engineers think about is… drawing comics.

Yet some of the most effective incident review practices I’ve seen don’t start with dashboards or timelines. They start with a wall, a stack of sticky notes or index cards, and a few pens.

In this post, we’ll explore the “Analog Incident Storyboard Wall”: a way to turn your most painful outages into a frame‑by‑frame paper comic that everyone on the team can understand. Along the way, we’ll connect this analog approach to modern incident practices:

• Customizable postmortem templates
• The Five Whys technique
• Early sharing of postmortem drafts
• Leveraging experienced postmortem writers
• Visual, narrated storytelling for complex decision‑making

Why Turn an Incident into a Comic in the First Place?

Incidents are already stressful and complex. Why add drawing to the mix?

Because incidents are stories:

• A starting state (“Everything looked normal… until it didn’t”).
• A trigger (“A deploy at 09:42 changed the query path”).
• Rising action (alerts, Slack messages, dashboards, guesses, reversions).
• A resolution (rollback, patch, or workaround).
• A moral or lesson (what we’ll do differently next time).

The problem is that most postmortems capture these stories in dense documents and timelines that:

• Overwhelm newcomers
• Hide crucial decision points
• Fail to convey why smart people made the choices they did under pressure

A frame‑by‑frame storyboard—like a comic—forces the team to:

• Slow down and reconstruct the narrative as discrete moments
• Make the invisible (assumptions, miscommunications, dead‑ends) visible
• Align on a shared understanding before jumping to solutions

And when you do it on paper, on a wall, standing together, you tap into something digital tools rarely give you: shared physical focus and embodied memory. People remember what they co‑created.

Step 1: Start with a Customizable Postmortem Template

Before sticky notes hit the wall, start with a structured, customizable postmortem template.

A good template:

• Standardizes the basics (when, what, who, impact)
• Leaves room for narrative and interpretation
• Guides deeper analysis (Five Whys, contributing factors, follow‑ups)

Consider including sections like:

1. Incident Summary
   One paragraph in plain language: what happened, to whom, and how it ended.

2. Impact Description
   Who was affected (customers, internal teams), how severely, and for how long.

3. Timeline (High‑Level)
   Key events in chronological order: detection, major decisions, key actions.

4. Narrative: What It Felt Like in the Moment
   Space for engineers and responders to write in first person: what they saw, thought, and tried.

5. Analysis (Five Whys, contributing factors)
   Where you transition from “what happened” to “why it happened.”

6. Follow‑Ups & Preventive Actions
   Short list of prioritized, owner‑assigned improvements.

Because the template is customizable, you can:

• Add storyboarding prompts (e.g., “What were the 5–10 key decisions?”)
• Tailor for different incident severities
• Incorporate organizational norms and expectations

This template becomes the scaffold on which your analog storyboard will hang.

Step 2: Apply the Five Whys from the Impact Backwards

The Five Whys technique is often taught as: start with the problem, ask "why" five times, reach a root cause.

In practice, many teams either:

• Stop too early (after one or two “whys”), or
• Fixate on a single technical root cause while ignoring process and human factors

The storyboard wall works best when you apply Five Whys starting from a clear impact description:

"Customers in EU could not log in for 53 minutes due to repeated 500 errors on the auth service."

From there:

1. Why did customers see 500 errors?
   Because the auth service exhausted its DB connections.

2. Why were DB connections exhausted?
   A new deploy introduced a query that didn’t use an index, causing timeouts.

3. Why did a non‑indexed query make it to production?
   Our pre‑prod environment doesn’t mirror production data volume.

4. Why doesn’t pre‑prod mirror production volume?
   We lack a realistic, scrubbed data set and the time to maintain it.

5. Why haven’t we invested in that environment?
   It’s not clearly owned, and its risks weren’t visible until this incident.

Each of these “whys” can become frames on the wall:

• One sticky note per why
• Short description plus a sketch or icon
• Links to log lines, PRs, or dashboards if needed (but only as references)

Visually walking from impact backward, you show that root cause is rarely one thing; it’s a chain of technical, organizational, and human factors.

Step 3: Build the Analog Storyboard Wall

Now the fun part: turning the incident into a comic.

Materials

• Sticky notes or index cards (multiple colors help)
• Markers or pens (thick enough to read from a distance)
• A wall or whiteboard with enough space

Basic Layout

Divide your wall into lanes:

• Time Lane – From left (start) to right (resolution)
• Actors Lane – On‑call, SRE, feature team, support, etc.
• State Lane – System state (healthy, degraded, failing, recovering)
• Decision Lane – Key decisions, hypotheses, and forks

Frame‑by‑Frame Reconstruction

1. Start at Detection

   • Frame: "PagerDuty fires – latency spike on /login"
   • Draw: A tiny pager or phone icon

2. Add Observations

   • What did responders see first?
   • Which dashboards or logs did they open?
   • What did they believe was happening?

3. Mark Decisions and Branches

   • "We rolled back the last deploy"
   • "We increased DB connections"
   • Use different colors for decisions vs. observations.

4. Capture Missteps and Dead Ends

   • "We initially suspected the CDN and lost 15 minutes"
   • Visualize this as a side branch that returns to the main path.

5. End at Resolution and Follow‑Up

   • Frame: "Rollback complete; error rate back to baseline"
   • Frame: "Create ticket to index new query and improve pre‑prod."

Engineers physically move sticky notes around, debate ordering, and adjust language.

This tactile, visual collaboration:

• Reveals hidden assumptions (“Wait, I thought we rolled back before the DB limits changed.”)
• Shows the real complexity of decision‑making
• Creates a single, shared story you’ll later translate into a written postmortem

Step 4: Draft the Postmortem and Share It Early

Once the wall tells a coherent story, convert it into your postmortem draft.

This is where your template does heavy lifting:

• Use the Timeline section to translate frames into events.
• Use the Narrative section to describe the human side: confusion, trade‑offs, communication.
• Use the Analysis section to integrate Five Whys from the impact backwards.

Then, share a draft about 24 hours before the postmortem meeting—for example, in a dedicated Slack channel.

When you share early, you:

• Catch factual inaccuracies before the meeting
• Let people who were quiet during the incident add their perspective
• Reduce meeting time spent on reconstruction, freeing more time for learning and follow‑ups

Encourage reviewers to comment on both style and content:

• Is the impact explained clearly in customer‑centric terms?
• Is the narrative honest about missteps without blaming individuals?
• Are acronyms and subsystem names understandable to non‑experts?

This pre‑meeting feedback is where the analog wall’s clarity turns into a crisp, shareable document.

Step 5: Leverage Experienced Postmortem Writers

Not everyone loves writing, and not everyone is good at turning chaotic events into clear prose.

Treat postmortem writing as a craft and explicitly leverage people who are good at it:

• Pair a less experienced incident commander with a seasoned writer
• Have a “postmortem editor” review drafts for clarity and consistency
• Build a small library of “gold standard” postmortems as references

Experienced writers help refine:

• Level of detail – Enough to be useful, not so much that the signal is buried
• Neutral, factual tone – Describe behaviors and decisions, not judgments
• Narrative clarity – Clear through‑line from impact → response → analysis → actions

The storyboard wall makes their job easier: the structure is already there. They simply:

1. Follow the frames in order
2. Translate them into prose
3. Weave in Five Whys and contributing factors

Over time, this mentorship raises the overall quality of your incident documentation.

Step 6: Use Visual, Narrated Storytelling to Teach and Align

The true power of the Analog Incident Storyboard Wall is how well it supports teaching and alignment.

During the postmortem meeting:

• Stand at the wall and walk through the story as if you’re narrating a comic.
• Point at each frame: what we knew, what we thought, what we decided.
• Pause at key inflection points: “Here we chose rollback over feature flag; let’s discuss why.”

This visual narrative format helps:

• New team members understand complex systems without reading 20 pages
• Cross‑functional partners (support, product, leadership) grasp trade‑offs quickly
• Executives see not just the technical issues, but the decision‑making process

You can even photograph or digitize the wall afterward and embed the images in your wiki or incident tool. The comic becomes a living artifact of how your team responds under pressure.

Conclusion: Make Learning from Incidents Tangible

The Analog Incident Storyboard Wall is not about cute drawings for their own sake. It’s about:

• Making incidents legible to everyone, not just the people in the war room
• Connecting structured analysis (templates, Five Whys, follow‑ups) with human experience (what it felt like to respond)
• Building a shared narrative that your organization can learn from and improve on

By combining:

• Customizable postmortem templates
• Five Whys starting from a clear impact
• Early draft sharing for feedback
• Guidance from experienced postmortem writers
• Visual, frame‑by‑frame storytelling

…you turn painful outages into some of your most valuable learning opportunities.

Next time something breaks, don’t just open another dashboard. Grab a stack of sticky notes, find a wall, and start drawing the story together.