Introduction

Most teams only meet their incidents once they’ve already exploded.

By the time an alert hits the on‑call’s phone at 3:07 a.m., it’s too late to influence the shape of the risk—only the intensity of the response. We obsess over dashboards, playbooks, and incident response platforms (and rightly so), but we often miss the moment where risk is still small enough to be reshaped with a conversation, a sticky note, or a ten‑minute debrief.

That’s where the Paper Incident Story Compass Drawer comes in.

Think of it as a desk‑sized ritual: a dedicated space—literal or digital—where you capture tiny stories of risk, near misses, and emerging friction before they harden into major incidents. It’s not another tool; it’s a habit that turns everyday operational noise into navigational guidance for your team.

In this post, we’ll unpack:

• Why adaptive incident management needs rituals, not just runbooks
• How modern incident platforms and automation fit into this picture
• How to run a simple “paper incident story” practice
• How to use those stories to fuel better postmortems and reduce future toil

From Firefighting to Navigation: Adaptive Incident Management

Traditional incident management is reactive: something breaks, alarms scream, people scramble. Adaptive incident management is different. It aims to:

• Reduce operational toil (repetitive, manual work that doesn’t add lasting value)
• Speed up incident detection and resolution
• Continuously adapt processes and systems based on what incidents are teaching you

Adaptive teams don’t only respond faster—they learn faster. Every incident, every failed deploy, every confusing alert is treated as a data point in a longer story about how the system behaves.

But here’s the catch: many of the most valuable signals are subtle and small. They show up as:

• A “weird” blip in a metric that auto‑resolves
• A deploy that almost failed but was quickly rolled back
• An on‑call who had to try three different dashboards to find the right one

These are near misses or close calls—unplanned events that could have caused disruption, but didn’t. They rarely become full postmortems. They often never make it into any tracking system. And yet they are some of the most actionable data for managing risk before it overflows.

That’s exactly what the Paper Incident Story Compass Drawer is for.

The Drawer: A Small Ritual With Big Leverage

Imagine a physically labeled drawer in your team space: “Incident Stories & Near Misses”.

Or, if you’re remote, a digital equivalent: a shared document, a Notion page, or a simple form that drops into a dedicated folder. The container doesn’t matter as much as the ritual.

The rule is simple:

Any time something “almost went wrong” or “felt harder than it should have during an incident,” you write a short paper story and put it in the drawer.

Each story answers just a few questions on a single page (or equivalent digital form):

1. What happened? (2–3 sentences, plain language)
2. Why did it matter? (What could have gone wrong? Impact “if worse.”)
3. What did we do in response? (Including any manual toil or ad‑hoc coordination.)
4. What felt fragile, confusing, or too slow?
5. What is one thing we might change to make this easier next time?

This is not a full postmortem. It’s a lightweight, narrative snapshot—a story a future teammate could read in under two minutes and immediately understand.

Over time, your drawer fills with:

• Small alerts that revealed bigger underlying risks
• Deployment scares that exposed gaps in observability or rollback strategies
• On‑call handoffs where critical context was missing
• Instances where collaboration tools or processes slowed people down

These fragments become a compass—a directional indicator of where your incident practice and systems need to adapt next.

Where Modern Incident Platforms Fit In

You might be thinking: We already have an incident platform like xMatters. Isn’t that enough?

Modern incident response platforms are incredibly powerful at what they’re designed for:

• Push‑button initiation of major incidents
• Coordinated communication across engineering, support, and leadership
• Automated workflows for paging, escalation, and status updates

They’re essential for:

• Making sure the right people get called in, fast
• Standardizing response steps
• Reducing manual toil during high‑stress events

But they typically activate once an incident has crossed a clear threshold—“we’re down,” “degraded,” or “customer‑visible impact.”

The Paper Incident Story Compass Drawer lives earlier in the lifecycle:

• Before you press the “Start Major Incident” button
• Before an alert wakes up the primary on‑call
• Before risk becomes visible outside the team

It captures and organizes the “sub‑threshold” experiences that rarely get tracked by tooling alone. Later, those stories help you decide what to automate next, where to refine your on‑call structure, and how to better configure your incident platform.

Think of it as qualitative fuel for quantitative tools.

The Role of On‑Call and Automation: Catching Risk Upstream

Effective on‑call management is the front line of risk control. Good on‑call practices and sensible automation can prevent minor issues from escalating into larger incidents.

Key elements include:

• Clear rotation schedules and expectations
• Thoughtful alert design (noise reduction, actionable signals)
• Runbooks and playbooks for common issues
• Automation for routine remediation steps

The Paper Incident Story Compass Drawer helps you continuously improve all of these by asking:

• Where did the on‑call get stuck?
• What work was tedious and could be automated?
• Where did existing runbooks fall short or confuse?
• What alerts were noisy, misleading, or missing?

Each story becomes a candidate for automation or process refinement:

• “We manually restarted Service X three times in one week” → Automate restart with safeguards, or address root cause.
• “On‑call didn’t know which dashboard to trust” → Create a single ‘golden’ dashboard and link it from alerts.
• “We had to page three different teams to find the real owner” → Update service ownership and routing rules in your incident platform.

In this way, the drawer becomes a backlog of practical improvements that directly cut toil and shorten future incidents.

Connecting the Drawer to Postmortems

Postmortems (or post‑incident reviews) are structured analyses conducted after significant incidents or outages. A good postmortem will:

• Document the timeline of what happened
• Identify root causes and contributing factors
• Assess the response (communication, decision‑making, tools)
• Define actionable improvements to prevent recurrence or reduce impact

But postmortems often focus on a single “big” event. The drawer gives you context around that event:

• Were there similar near misses in the weeks prior?
• Had people already felt the pain of missing automation, unclear ownership, or fragile components?
• Did we ignore early warning signs because they “self‑resolved”?

When preparing a postmortem, pull relevant stories from the drawer:

• Attach them as prior signals in the postmortem doc.
• Use them to show a pattern, not an isolated failure.
• Ask, “What would it have taken to act on these stories earlier?”

This shifts the tone from “Who messed up?” to “How does our system produce these conditions, and how can we reshape it?”

You can also run periodic “meta‑postmortems” on the drawer itself:

• Once a month or quarter, take an hour to sort the stories.
• Cluster them by themes: observability gaps, ownership confusion, recurring manual fixes, brittle dependencies.
• From each cluster, choose 1–3 concrete improvement actions.

This keeps your risk landscape—often invisible—tangible and actionable.

How to Start Your Own Paper Incident Story Compass Drawer

You can get started in a week with minimal effort:

1. Create the Container

• Physical: A labeled drawer or box, plus a short template printed on index cards or half‑pages.
• Digital: A simple form (e.g., Google Form) that writes to a shared document or board.

2. Define the Story Template

Keep it small and repeatable:

• What happened?
• Why did it matter / what could have gone wrong?
• What did we do?
• What felt fragile or too hard?
• One small thing we might improve.

3. Make It Part of the Rhythm

• Ask for 1–2 stories per on‑call week per engineer.
• Add a 10‑minute slot in your weekly standup to read one story aloud.
• Celebrate short, honest stories—don’t wait for “perfect” ones.

4. Connect to Your Tools

• When you notice recurring themes, translate them into:
  • New or improved runbooks
  • Tweaks in xMatters (routing, escalation, automated workflows)
  • Observability improvements (alerts, dashboards)
  • Documentation or training updates

5. Close the Feedback Loop

At least monthly:

• Summarize top themes from the drawer.
• Share them with the wider team or leadership.
• Explicitly list improvements that came from the drawer stories.

This proves the ritual is worth the effort—and encourages more contributions.

Conclusion: Small Stories, Big Safety

Most teams think of incident management as a set of tools and runbooks that activate when things are already on fire. But adaptive, resilient organizations treat incidents as stories that can guide the evolution of their systems long before alarms go critical.

The Paper Incident Story Compass Drawer is intentionally small: a page, a drawer, a 10‑minute conversation. Its power comes from consistency. When you regularly capture near misses and minor frustrations, you:

• Reduce operational toil by spotting automatable patterns
• Strengthen on‑call by exposing real‑world friction
• Feed your incident platform with better configuration and workflows
• Enrich postmortems with context and early warning signals
• Turn everyday operational noise into a living map of your risk landscape

You don’t need a new product to start—just a place to put the stories, and a commitment to read them. Over time, that modest drawer becomes a compass, quietly pointing your team away from future outages and toward a calmer, more reliable system.

Before risk overflows, give it a place to land—and a story to tell.