The Cardboard Incident Observatory Carousel: Spinning Paper Dashboards to See Outages From Every Seat

Picture your next major outage not as a war room, but as a carousel—a “Cardboard Incident Observatory Carousel.” Instead of blinding dashboards across too many screens, you’ve got a ring of simple, shared paper dashboards that anyone can walk around, read, and understand.

Engineering, security, product, customer support, leadership—they’re all standing at different horses on the carousel, looking at the same incident from different angles. As the carousel spins (figuratively, or literally in a tabletop exercise), every seat gets a turn to see what the others see.

It sounds whimsical, but this is a concrete strategy: use creative, low‑tech visual metaphors and structured templates to make incidents more understandable, more teachable, and more fixable.

This post explores how to design and use a “cardboard incident observatory carousel” to:

Make outages legible to everyone, not just the graph‑fluent few
Standardize post‑incident learning without killing nuance
Practice and stress‑test your process using game days and drills
Keep improving as systems and risks evolve

Why Low‑Tech Beats Fancy Dashboards During Stress

During an incident, complexity is your enemy. The more tools, tabs, and context people must juggle, the more likely someone misses the obvious.

Digital dashboards are powerful—but they’re also:

Ephemeral: Screens change, queries get edited, tabs get closed.
Exclusive: Not everyone has the right access, training, or tooling.
Distracting: Real‑time charts can pull attention to noise instead of signal.

Paper dashboards and cardboard boards flip this around:

They’re persistent in the room (or on camera), visible at a glance.
They’re tool‑agnostic—no logins, licenses, or complex UIs.
They force prioritization: space is limited, so only the essentials make the cut.

Think of them like the big whiteboards in a fire station: always there, always clear, designed for shared situational awareness, not for aesthetics.

Designing Your Paper Dashboards: The Core Panels

Start by designing a basic set of paper dashboards that can be reused across incidents. Print them as A3/A2 posters, or use large sticky notes or cardboard.

At minimum, consider these core panels:

1. Incident Overview Panel

Purpose: Give everyone the same “headline” and scope.

Sections:

Name/ID: Short, human‑readable label (e.g., “Checkout 500s – Feb 10”).
Start Time / Detection Time: When it began, when it was first noticed.
Current Status: (e.g., Investigating / Mitigated / Monitoring / Resolved).
Blast Radius: Which products, regions, or customers are affected?
Severity Level & Owner: Who’s IC (incident commander)? What Sev?

This board should be the first thing anyone sees when they enter the room or join the call.

2. Impact & Customer Signals Panel

Purpose: Keep human impact front and center.

Sections:

Customer‑visible symptoms: Timeouts, errors, delays, data corruption.
Support data: Ticket volume, major clients impacted, social media spikes.
Business impact: Lost orders, SLAs breached, compliance implications.

This panel grounds engineers in why the incident matters, not just what’s failing.

3. Technical Signals & Hypotheses Panel

Purpose: Capture what you’re seeing, what you think it might be, and what you’ve tried.

Sections:

Key metrics: A few hand‑drawn graphs or trend summaries (e.g., “RPS dropped by ~40% at 09:13,” “DB CPU at 95%”).
Top hypotheses: Numbered, updated as you learn (H1, H2, H3…).
Actions taken: Mitigations, rollbacks, config changes, experiments.
Results of actions: What improved, what didn’t, what backfired.

This board is your living narrative of the technical investigation.

4. Communications & Coordination Panel

Purpose: Make sure no one wonders, “Who’s doing what?”

Sections:

Roles: IC, comms lead, domain experts, liaison to support.
Update cadence: When is the next internal & external update due?
Channels: Links to incident doc, status page, key Slack/Teams channels.

This panel keeps the incident from turning into a coordination nightmare.

The 360° View: Rotating Perspectives on the Same Outage

The “carousel” metaphor becomes powerful when you literally rotate perspectives on the same incident.

Think of five default perspectives:

Engineering – What failed technically? Which systems, dependencies, and guardrails didn’t behave as expected?
Security – Any confidentiality, integrity, or availability risks? Any signs this could be an abuse vector or attack?
Product – How did this break promises we make to users? What workflows or value were disrupted?
Customer Support & Success – What did users actually say? What surprised them? Where did our messaging fail or succeed?
Leadership & Risk – How does this map to our risk appetite, SLAs, reputation, and strategic priorities?

On your cardboard carousel, you can:

Create one board per perspective with guided questions.
Rotate people through boards in small groups during reviews.
Force a pause at each “seat” so teams really inhabit that vantage point.

For example, at the Support seat, the board might ask:

What were the top 3 customer complaints during the incident?
Where did our internal knowledge base help or fail support agents?
What could we have told customers earlier or more clearly?

At the Security seat:

Did any defenses trigger? If not, should they have?
Could an attacker have exploited the same root cause intentionally?
Are there monitoring gaps that would hide security‑relevant signals?

This “rotation” turns incident analysis into a 360° walk‑around of reality, instead of a narrow postmortem dominated by whoever speaks loudest.

Structured Post‑Incident Templates: The Carousel’s Blueprint

To avoid every incident review becoming a blank‑page exercise, create a structured post‑incident review template that maps to your carousel.

Suggested sections:

Incident Summary
- Short narrative, timeline, blast radius, severity.
Technical Deep Dive
- What failed, why it failed, contributing factors, guardrails that didn’t help.
Perspective Snapshots (Carousel Seats)
- One page per perspective (Engineering, Security, Product, Support, Leadership).
- Standard questions that get answered for each seat.
Decision Log & Trade‑offs
- Key decisions, options considered, constraints and trade‑offs.
Actions & Owners
- Preventive changes, detection improvements, playbook updates.
- Each with an owner, priority, and due date.
Learning & Storytelling
- What did we learn about our system, team, and organization?
- How can we turn this into an onboarding or training story?

Print the empty template for your tabletop and maintain it digitally. The paper version keeps people focused during the discussion; the digital version becomes your system of record.

Game Days and Firefighter Drills: Practicing on the Carousel

You don’t want your first ride on the cardboard carousel to be during a Sev‑1.

Borrow from game days and firefighter drills:

Simulate realistic outages
- Use staging or safe chaos experiments in production.
- Pre‑define a simple scenario (e.g., DB latency spike, third‑party API failure).
Run the incident using your paper dashboards
- Assign an IC, comms lead, and domain responders.
- Fill in the Overview, Impact, Technical, and Comms panels in real time.
Switch to carousel mode for debrief
- Set up the five perspective seats.
- Move groups through each station for 5–10 minutes.
- Capture answers on each perspective board.
Reflect on both tech and process
- What would we change about our systems?
- What would we change about our dashboards and templates?
- Did everyone, regardless of role, understand what was going on?

Over time, these drills turn cardboard into muscle memory: people instinctively know where to look, what to write, and how to talk about outages clearly.

Turning the Carousel into a Tabletop Exercise

For fully remote or hybrid teams, you can adapt the carousel idea without physical cardboard.

Options:

Use a shared digital whiteboard (Miro, FigJam, Lucidspark) as your carousel.
Create one frame per paper dashboard: Overview, Impact, Technical, Comms, plus the five perspective boards.
During tabletop exercises, move participants between frames instead of seats.
Timebox each stop (e.g., 7 minutes per seat) and have groups type directly into the boards.

The key is not the material (cardboard vs pixels) but the constraint and choreography: a limited set of simple, shared views and a deliberate rotation of perspectives.

Continuous Learning: Updating the Carousel as You Evolve

Systems change. Teams grow. Risks shift. Your carousel must move with them.

Build in a regular cadence to revisit and tune your setup:

Quarterly review of templates and boards
- Are we asking the right questions at each seat?
- Do we need new perspectives (e.g., Compliance, Data Privacy)?
Incident‑driven tweaks
- After notable outages, add or refine prompts that would have helped.
- Retire questions that never surface useful insight.
Share stories widely
- Turn strong post‑incident reviews into brown‑bag talks, wiki pages, or onboarding modules.
- Highlight how the carousel changed what you noticed or decided.

The goal is a living observatory: each incident and each drill slightly improve your vantage points, your questions, and your responses.

Conclusion: Make Incidents Visible From Every Seat

Modern systems are too complex for a single vantage point. The “Cardboard Incident Observatory Carousel” is a playful metaphor for a serious discipline:

Use low‑tech, paper‑style dashboards to keep everyone aligned on what’s happening.
Rotate through multiple perspectives to see the full 360° of any outage.
Rely on structured post‑incident templates to capture consistent, actionable learning.
Practice with game days and drills so these tools work under real pressure.
Continuously update your carousel as your systems and risks evolve.

Whether it’s literally cardboard on easels or virtual boards on a screen, the principle is the same: incidents are not just a technical puzzle; they’re a multi‑seat ride. Design your observatory so every seat can see clearly, contribute meaningfully, and help your organization learn faster than its failures.