The Analog Incident Train Station Floor Tape Labyrinth: Walking Your Outage Paths Before the Next Pager Storm

When the pager storm hits—alarms firing, dashboards bleeding red, operators scrambling—you don’t want to be discovering your outage paths for the first time. You want muscle memory. You want a shared mental model. You want everyone to know, instinctively, what happens after the first alarm, the second failure, the third cascading dependency.

That’s where the “train station floor tape labyrinth” comes in: a deliberately low‑tech, highly physical way of rehearsing complex outages before they happen.

In this post, we’ll explore how:

Incident response tabletop exercises can be made more realistic for industrial control systems (ICS).
Physically walking outage paths helps teams internalize dependencies far better than slides or diagrams.
Embodied cognition and human‑robot collaboration concepts can guide how we design both our drills and our tools.
Load testing and chaos experiments act as a digital tabletop, complementing the analog labyrinth.
Iterating on these exercises builds real-world readiness before the next pager storm.

From PowerPoint Tabletop to Train Station Labyrinth

Traditional incident response tabletop exercises usually look like this:

People in a meeting room
A facilitator describing an outage scenario
Participants saying what they would do
Someone taking notes

This is valuable, but it’s also abstract—and abstraction is the enemy when dealing with ICS and other complex, tightly coupled systems. Dependencies are subtle, paths are non‑linear, and the difference between “we think we can fail over” and “we can fail over” is enormous.

Now imagine a different approach.

You arrive at a large open area—maybe a warehouse floor or a big conference room. On the ground, colorful tape maps out:

Systems and subsystems (PLC networks, HMI, historian, SCADA, cloud services)
Support functions (OT network, corporate IT, vendors, field crews)
External dependencies (power, telecoms, physical access, safety systems)
Decision points and failure branches

It looks a bit like a train station map exploded onto the floor: lines connecting nodes, labeled “tracks” for data, power, and control flows.

The facilitator announces the scenario:

“We’ve lost primary telemetry from Field Site A. Network alarms show intermittent packet loss. Start at the HMI operator track and follow the outage path.”

Now, instead of talking through a response, your team walks it.

Why Walking Outage Paths Works Better Than Just Drawing Them

Diagrams on a slide are static. They compress time, space, and complexity into 2D. People nod along, but they don’t always feel the dependencies.

Physically walking outage paths changes that:

Spatial navigation forces clarity
When a network link is three meters of tape across the room, people start asking:
- “Why is this node on the same ‘track’ as this unsafe dependency?”
- “Why do we always route through this single box?” You see choke points literally under your feet.
Multiple roles can move simultaneously
Operators, network engineers, automation specialists, and managers can each follow their own “line,” then converge at key junctions. This highlights coordination gaps:
- Who is blocked waiting for whom?
- Where is information flow too slow or too centralized?
Confusion becomes visible
Any time someone stops and says, “Wait, where do I go now?” that’s a signal of a hidden complexity. These moments often expose:
- Undocumented manual steps
- Unclear ownership (“Who can approve this bypass?”)
- Misaligned assumptions between OT and IT teams

You’re not just rehearsing technical steps—you’re making the social and organizational pathways tangible.

Embodied Cognition: Your Brain Thinks With Your Feet

This approach isn’t just a gimmick. It rests on principles of embodied cognition: the idea that thinking is tightly coupled to the body and the environment, not just the brain in isolation.

In the context of incident response drills:

Movement reinforces memory
Walking a path, turning at a junction, standing at a decision point—all of this encodes information spatially. Participants are more likely to remember:
- “I had to walk all the way over to the ‘OT Security’ zone before we could proceed.”
- “There was this awkward loop where we had to backtrack because a change management approval was missing.”
Physical metaphors expose design flaws
When the “path” to complete a failover requires multiple long detours and back‑and‑forth, people feel friction in their bodies. That discomfort often prompts constructive questions about simplifying or automating steps.
Shared space builds shared mental models
Instead of each role carrying its own partial, internal map of the system, everyone now has a common, physical reference. After the exercise, phrases like

“Remember that red junction where OT and IT paths crossed?” become shorthand for complex interdependencies.

By designing your labyrinth with clear zones, color coding, and symbolic layouts, you leverage the brain’s natural strengths in spatial reasoning to make incident response stick.

Automation as a Co‑Pilot: Lessons from Human‑Robot Collaboration

Modern ICS environments increasingly blend human operators, advanced automation, and sometimes even physical robots. Concepts from human‑robot collaboration—like shared control and context‑aware actions—offer a powerful metaphor for how tools should behave during outages.

In your floor tape labyrinth, you can model this by marking:

Automated actions: steps the system can perform without human input (e.g., automatic failover, alarm suppression rules, anomaly detection triggers).
Shared‑control actions: steps where tools assist but humans decide (e.g., recommended runbooks, suggested network reroutes, decision support dashboards).
Human‑only decisions: steps that require judgment, risk trade‑offs, or regulatory awareness.

During the walk‑through, ask:

Where should automation act autonomously?
Where should it propose options but not act without a human?
Where must humans always stay in charge, even if slower?

The goal is a collaborative ecosystem, not replacement:

Monitoring tools anticipate operator needs and surface the right context.
Runbooks embed knowledge gleaned from previous labyrinth sessions.
Automation handles repeatable, low‑risk tasks so humans can focus on novel or high‑consequence decisions.

Just as in human‑robot collaboration, the right design reduces cognitive load while keeping humans meaningfully, and safely, in the loop.

Load Testing as Your Digital Tabletop Exercise

The analog labyrinth is powerful, but it’s only half the story. Outages aren’t just about process; they’re also about how systems behave under stress.

This is where load testing and chaos experiments come in.

Think of them as your digital tabletop:

Load testing simulates peak traffic, degraded networks, or spikes in control commands.
Chaos experiments deliberately break components—drop packets, kill services, introduce latency—to observe real failure modes.

These simulations show you:

Whether your ICS and supporting IT infrastructure degrade gracefully or catastrophically
How alarms propagate (and whether they overwhelm operators)
Where timeouts, retry storms, or failover races occur

Combined with the analog exercise, you get a fuller picture.

Blending Analog and Digital: A Complete Outage Rehearsal

The real power emerges when you merge physical walk‑throughs with technical simulations.

A sample blended exercise might look like this:

Pre‑work: Digital stress test
Run a load test or chaos scenario that stresses a critical subsystem (e.g., loss of a key telemetry link or database under high load). Capture:
- Metrics and traces
- Alarm patterns
- Actual failure cascades
Build the outage path in tape
Use findings from the simulation to lay out:
- Systems that failed or degraded
- Teams that had to intervene
- Decision points where different choices could have improved outcomes
Walk the path with all stakeholders
Include:
- Control room operators
- OT/IT engineers
- Cybersecurity
- Field technicians
- Management or incident commanders
Rehearse:
- How the scenario would unfold in real time
- Who talks to whom, when
- Which tools provide the needed context (and which don’t yet)
Iterate on both process and system design
From the exercise, identify:
- Single points of failure
- Bottlenecks in coordination
- Opportunities for smarter automation or better runbooks
Then feed those changes back into:
- System architecture and redundancy plans
- Monitoring and alerting configurations
- Documentation and training

Building Muscle Memory Before the Next Pager Storm

Doing this once is not enough. The real benefits come from regular iteration:

Repetition creates muscle memory
Running variations of the same scenario every few months helps:
- New team members internalize procedures
- Experienced staff refine and streamline responses
Response times shrink
When everyone knows the first three things they’ll do when a specific alarm comes in, you eliminate hesitation and reduce time‑to‑stabilize.
Hidden failure modes surface early
Each new labyrinth session tends to reveal another:
- Undocumented dependency
- Ambiguous ownership boundary
- Risky manual workaround

By exposing these issues in a low‑risk, low‑stress environment, you prevent them from surprising you in the middle of a real outage.

Getting Started: A Practical Checklist

You don’t need a huge budget to build your first train station floor tape labyrinth. Start small:

Pick one critical scenario
For example: “Loss of primary control network link to a major field site during peak demand.”
Identify key systems and teams
Map the core components and people who would be involved.
Create the floor map
- Use painter’s tape, printed labels, and arrows
- Define clear zones (e.g., Control Room, OT Network, IT Network, Field, Vendors, Safety)
Script a timed scenario
Include unfolding events at 5, 10, 20 minutes to create realistic pressure.
Facilitate, don’t lecture
Let participants move, argue, and discover. Your job is to observe and capture insights.
Debrief and document
- What confused people?
- Where were delays?
- What automation or tooling would have helped?
Feed results into your digital tests
Align future load and chaos tests with the weak spots you uncovered.

Conclusion: Walk the Tracks Before the Trains Derail

Complex ICS environments fail in complex ways. Slides and static diagrams can’t fully prepare teams for the messy reality of outages. By turning your incident response paths into a physical train station floor tape labyrinth, you:

Harness embodied cognition to deepen understanding and retention
Make dependencies, bottlenecks, and single points of failure visible
Practice collaboration between humans and tools in a realistic way
Complement physical rehearsals with digital stress tests and chaos experiments
Build the muscle memory needed to weather the next pager storm

You can’t prevent every failure. But you can decide whether your first real encounter with a cascading outage happens at 3 a.m. under pressure—or in an empty room, in daylight, where the worst consequence of taking a wrong turn is peeling up some tape and drawing a better path.

Start walking your outage tracks now, before the trains are moving at full speed.