Introduction: What If You Could Sit Inside Your Incident Review?

Most incident reviews live in the same place: a Confluence page, a Google Doc, or maybe a tool like Jeli. We scroll, we skim, we copy-paste timelines, and—if we’re honest—then we move on. The lessons stay trapped in documents and dashboards, while the people who live through incidents carry the real complexity in their heads.

The Paper Incident Story Compass Garden Bench asks a different question:

What if incident data and post-incident reviews were something you could literally sit with, unfold, and explore together—like a map in a park instead of a PDF on a screen?

This project is exactly that: a fold-out, physical reliability map designed as a “garden bench” you sit on and around. It’s part furniture, part story map, part teaching tool. And it’s built to transform incident analysis from a solitary, document-driven task into an embodied, collaborative, and even playful practice.

From Postmortem Checklist to Sit-Down Story Map

The Paper Incident Story Compass Garden Bench builds on the growing ecosystem of tools that support modern incident analysis, especially things like Jeli’s Post-Incident Review list. Those tools help teams:

• Decide which incidents deserve deeper analysis
• Evaluate impact and scope (users, systems, business)
• Consider the learning potential of each incident

The bench takes those same ideas and pushes them into physical space. Instead of an abstract “list of criteria,” you get a fold-out map that:

• Spreads across a bench surface and surrounding panels
• Organizes incidents by size, impact, and learning potential
• Shows prompts and pathways that encourage guided exploration

Teams can literally sit down with their incident history, following a compass-like layout that helps them:

• Choose which incidents to revisit
• Trace how decisions were made in real time
• Connect technical details to human experiences (fatigue, confusion, collaboration)

The result is a kind of reliability atlas—not just where things went wrong, but how your team responded, adapted, and learned.

A Real-World Reliability Project: Students, SRE, and Dr. Bishop

This isn’t just a thought experiment or speculative design. The Paper Incident Story Compass Garden Bench emerged from a semester-long collaboration between:

• Dr. Bishop, who brought expertise in reliability, incident analysis, and socio-technical systems
• A team of undergraduate software engineering students, who took on the challenge as a real-world project

Together, they treated this bench/map as a serious reliability artifact, not a novelty:

1. Research & framing
   The team studied incident response practices, post-incident reviews, and modern SRE thinking about socio-technical systems. They looked at tools like Jeli’s Post-Incident Review list to understand how organizations choose which incidents to dig into.

2. Design & iteration
   They asked: how can we make a map that:

   • Supports practical SRE work (on-call rotations, runbooks, alerting)?
   • Encourages conversation, not just reading?
   • Helps students and practitioners develop judgment about which incidents matter most for learning?

3. Implementation
   The students didn’t just design a diagram; they built the actual fold-out bench/map: a usable object that can be placed in labs, classrooms, offices, and reliability workshops.

This gave the students hands-on exposure to reliability work as a socio-technical discipline—not merely as “keep the service up,” but as shaping how people work, learn, and sustain themselves over time.

Modern SRE Is Socio-Technical (And the Bench Makes That Visible)

Modern Site Reliability Engineering has moved far beyond just metrics and runbooks. We know that:

• On-call load affects burnout, turnover, and learning
• Incidents are shaped by communication practices, org structure, and tooling, not just code and configs
• Post-incident reviews are cultural rituals, not just reports

The Paper Incident Story Compass Garden Bench is built around this perspective. It doesn’t just show technical data; it frames incidents as stories of people interacting with systems under real constraints.

On the bench/map, you can imagine zones, prompts, or overlays that guide conversation like:

• What did on-call actually feel like that week?
• Where did we rely on unwritten knowledge?
• Which decisions were slowed down by unclear ownership?
• What did this incident reveal about our alert design or runbooks?

By physically sitting together and following these prompts, teams learn to see incidents as socio-technical events, not isolated outages. That shift is crucial for building sustainable reliability practices that don’t burn people out.

The “Compass” and the “Wheel of Misfortune”

The “compass” metaphor in the Paper Incident Story Compass Garden Bench connects directly to practices like the “wheel of misfortune”—a role-playing game popular in SRE circles where teams rehearse incident scenarios in a low-risk setting.

Where the wheel of misfortune focuses on simulated response ("What would you do?"), the compass bench focuses on guided exploration of real history ("What did we actually do, and what does that tell us?").

The compass-like structure can:

• Orient you to different dimensions of an incident (time, impact, uncertainty, communication channels, affected services)
• Provide directions for how to move through a story: from detection → investigation → mitigation → follow-up
• Offer routes tailored to different learning goals, such as:
  • Improving on-call handoffs
  • Sharpening runbooks
  • Rethinking alert thresholds
  • Understanding cognitive load during long incidents

Together, the compass and the wheel of misfortune can create a full learning loop:

1. Use the bench/compass to deeply explore past incidents.
2. Use those insights to design simulated scenarios (wheel of misfortune).
3. Practice response in a low-stakes environment.
4. Feed lessons back into the map and your reliability practices.

Turning Abstract Reliability Principles into a Concrete, Shared Experience

In many organizations, incident knowledge is fragmented:

• On-call engineers remember how it felt but may not write it down.
• SRE leads collect metrics and timelines but struggle to convey nuance.
• Leadership sees aggregated dashboards and misses the human reality.

The bench/map is designed to bridge these gaps by creating a shared, physical anchor for conversation.

Imagine a team reliability workshop where:

• The bench is laid out with selected incidents plotted on the map.
• Each incident is annotated with cards or tokens representing:
  • User impact
  • On-call workload
  • Number of handoffs
  • Surprise factors (“We didn’t know this dependency existed.”)
• Team members sit around the bench and walk through incidents together, literally pointing to different phases and decisions.

Along the way, the map nudges them to discuss:

• On-call rotations: Are they fair? Are we overloading certain roles or time zones?
• Runbooks: Did they help? Were they findable and current? Did they match reality?
• Alerting: Which alerts added noise? Which ones were missing when we needed them?
• Burnout risks: Did anyone feel unsafe, overwhelmed, or pressured to cut corners?

By turning these abstract reliability concepts into a tangible, spatial experience, the bench helps teams:

• Build shared mental models of their systems and processes
• Normalize talking about human factors in incidents
• Strengthen psychological safety around admitting confusion or overload

From Dry Postmortems to Playful, Embodied Learning

Most teams would agree that post-incident reviews are important. But they often feel:

• Dry and report-driven
• Rushed, because everyone wants to “get back to work”
• Focused on blame-free language but still subtly oriented around “what went wrong”

The Paper Incident Story Compass Garden Bench reframes this entirely:

• Embodied: You sit, move, point, gesture. Your body is involved, not just your eyes on a screen.
• Collaborative: Reviews happen in a shared space, with multiple perspectives present.
• Playful: The garden bench and map aesthetic invites curiosity, experimentation, and exploration.

That playfulness is not about trivializing incidents. It’s about creating psychologically spacious conditions where people can:

• Be honest about confusion and uncertainty
• Explore “near misses” and weird edge cases
• Ask “What if?” in a non-threatening way

Those are the conditions under which teams actually internalize reliability lessons, instead of just checking the “postmortem completed” box.

Conclusion: Sit With Your Incidents, Don’t Just File Them

The Paper Incident Story Compass Garden Bench is more than a quirky piece of furniture. It’s a physical argument for a different way of doing reliability work:

• One that treats incidents as stories we learn from, not just failures to document.
• One that understands on-call as a human experience, not just a schedule.
• One that uses maps, compasses, and benches to make reliability knowledge shared, visible, and durable.

By folding incident data and post-incident review practices into a tangible, sit-down experience, this project invites teams to:

• Choose more thoughtfully which incidents to study deeply
• Explore those incidents from multiple socio-technical angles
• Turn lessons into muscle memory, not just bullet points

If your incident reviews feel like a chore, consider what would change if you could literally sit inside your reliability practice. The Paper Incident Story Compass Garden Bench is one answer to that question—and an invitation to treat reliability not just as an engineering problem, but as a shared, human craft.