Welcome to the Paper-Only Incident Bistro

Imagine your incident response practice as a tiny neighborhood bistro.

No giant screens. No complicated dashboards. Just:

• A handwritten menu that every server knows by heart.
• A paper order pad where each ticket tells the story of a customer’s experience.
• A kitchen line that runs on rituals, timing, and trust.

That’s the spirit of the Paper-Only Incident Bistro: using low-tech, high-discipline practices—like handwritten menus, tabletop timelines, and repeatable rituals—to build reliability you can count on when things go sideways.

This isn’t anti-tool. It’s pro-intention. By stripping away automation during practice, you expose gaps, sharpen judgment, and build muscle memory. Then you plug tools back in—on purpose.

Why Tabletop Exercises Are Your Test Kitchen

Top restaurants don’t experiment on paying customers. They rehearse.

In reliability and incident response, tabletop exercises are your test kitchen: a structured, low-risk way to rehearse how your team will handle real emergencies before production is on the line.

A tabletop exercise is a facilitated session where you:

1. Walk through a realistic scenario (e.g., partial region outage, data corruption, third-party dependency failure).
2. Talk out loud about what you’d do at each step.
3. Capture decisions, confusion, and missing information on paper.

No keyboards. No terminals. Just:

• Printed diagrams
• Runbooks on clipboards
• A big paper timeline on the wall

This setup slows thinking just enough to:

• Reveal assumptions (“Wait, who owns DNS again?”)
• Expose undocumented dependencies (“We can’t fail over without that one script.”)
• Clarify roles (“Who talks to customers? Who decides to roll back?”)

You don’t need a crisis to learn these lessons. You can learn them over coffee and markers.

Handwritten Menus: Runbooks as Daily Specials

In the Paper-Only Incident Bistro, your runbooks are the handwritten menu on the chalkboard.

They’re not meant to be permanent works of art—they’re:

• Practical: Clear steps, expected outcomes, and decision points.
• Living: Updated whenever reality proves them wrong.
• Local: Located where responders will actually use them (printed or easily findable).

A good “menu” runbook might have sections like:

• Ingredients: Preconditions, access, required tools.
• Prep Steps: “Before you touch anything, check these signals and logs.”
• Main Course: Clear, numbered actions with expected results.
• Tasting Notes: How to validate that the system is healthy again.
• Allergens & Warnings: Known pitfalls, risky commands, and “do not do this under pressure.”

During tabletop exercises, force teams to use these runbooks on paper:

• Print them.
• Mark them up with pens.
• Circle confusing steps.
• Add missing commands.

By the end, the runbook looks like a chef’s menu after a busy night: annotated, stained, and incredibly valuable. That’s how you know it’s real.

Tabletop Timelines: Tickets on the Kitchen Line

Restaurants track the life of an order from the moment it’s taken to the moment it hits the table. You should track incidents the same way.

A paper timeline is one of the simplest, most powerful tools you can use:

• Grab a wide sheet of paper or whiteboard.
• Draw a horizontal line across.
• Mark time in 5-minute increments.
• As the scenario unfolds, write down key events:
  • When the first alert fired
  • When the incident was declared
  • Who was paged and when
  • What actions were taken
  • When communication updates went out

This visual timeline does three things:

1. Reveals bottlenecks: “Why did it take 18 minutes to page the database owner?”
2. Surfaces confusion: “We thought marketing was informed at 10:10, but that didn’t really happen until 10:25.”
3. Improves future playbooks: You can design better escalation paths and communication cadences by seeing the flow end to end.

Again, doing this on paper—not hidden inside tools—makes the flow impossible to ignore and easy to critique as a group.

Daily Reliability as Service Work

Reliability isn’t just what you do during a big outage; it’s the service work you perform every day.

Think of your on-call practice like running a bistro:

• Opening checklists: Are backups healthy? Are dashboards green? Are alerts noisy today?
• Mise en place (everything in its place): Are credentials, runbooks, diagrams, and contact lists available and current?
• Prep work: Are new services documented? Are feature flags and rollbacks clear?

These mundane, consistent rituals create muscle memory:

• You know where to look first.
• You know who owns what.
• You know how to escalate when needed.

During a crisis, you’re not inventing a process; you’re executing one you’ve practiced, refined, and trusted.

Treat reliability rituals as:

• Real work, not “nice-to-have.”
• Part of your team’s professional craft.
• A shared responsibility, not something only SREs care about.

Follow-the-Sun: Hand-offs as Passing the Line

Global, follow-the-sun on-call models only work when hand-offs are treated like passing the kitchen line between shifts.

A good shift change doesn’t just transfer alerts; it transfers:

• Trust: “You’re fully empowered to act; here’s what I’ve tried and why.”
• Context: “We saw intermittent latency; we suspect dependency X; logs Y and Z showed anomalies.”
• Ownership: “You own this incident now. Here’s the current status and next decision point.”

Paper can help here too:

• Maintain a standardized hand-off template (even if you fill it digitally):
  • What’s currently broken?
  • What’s the impact?
  • What have we tried?
  • What’s risky or unknown?
  • What’s likely to happen next?
• Encourage short, written summaries before verbal or video hand-off.

In tabletop exercises, simulate:

• An incident starting in one region’s daytime and continuing into another’s.
• How information is passed between teams in different time zones.

Then critique the hand-off:

• Was anything ambiguous?
• Did the new team feel fully briefed?
• Could they act without waking the previous shift?

Templates and Checklists: Recipes for Emergencies

Great kitchens rely on recipes and prep lists. Your incident response should rely on standardized templates and checklists for simulations and real events.

Some useful templates:

• Incident declaration template

  • What happened? (symptoms, not guesses)
  • Who is affected?
  • When did it start?
  • What’s the current impact level?

• Escalation checklist

  • Have we paged the right primary/secondary owners?
  • Is an incident commander assigned?
  • Is a communications owner assigned?
  • Have we updated the status page (if needed)?

• Post-incident review skeleton

  • Timeline of events
  • What went well
  • What was confusing or missing
  • Action items (with clear owners and deadlines)

Use these same templates in your tabletop “bistro”: print them and fill them in by hand during the exercise. If you consistently skip parts, that’s a signal—you either don’t need them or your process is out of sync with reality.

Culture, Communication, and Stress

Under stress, people don’t suddenly become better communicators.

In global teams, cultural awareness matters a lot:

• Some cultures are comfortable with direct language (“This is broken and we need to stop deploys now.”).
• Others use more indirect phrasing (“We might want to reconsider today’s changes.”).

During incidents, that difference can affect:

• How fast issues are escalated
• How clearly ownership is claimed
• Whether concerns are taken seriously

Use tabletop exercises to:

• Agree on shared norms for escalation (“If you say ‘Blocker’, we all know what that means.”).
• Practice clear, written updates at regular intervals.
• Normalize asking for clarification: “When you say ‘minor,’ what is the actual customer impact?”

By making communication a first-class part of the exercise—not an afterthought—you build habits that carry into real incidents.

Why Writing Things Down Still Wins

In a world full of tools, writing things down on paper can feel old-fashioned. It’s also incredibly effective.

Writing slows you down just enough to:

• Think more clearly.
• Notice contradictions.
• See missing steps.

When you:

• Handwrite your runbooks.
• Sketch your incident timelines.
• Draft your hand-off notes.

…you’re forcing your brain to organize information and reveal gaps.

Later, you can digitize and automate. But the first draft in ink often shows you what your tools have been hiding.

Closing the Kitchen: Bringing It All Together

The Paper-Only Incident Bistro isn’t about rejecting technology. It’s about:

• Practicing in low-tech, high-awareness environments.
• Using tabletop exercises to safely rehearse your worst days.
• Treating reliability rituals as daily service work, not emergency improvisation.
• Strengthening follow-the-sun hand-offs with clear, written ownership and context.
• Using templates and checklists as recipes for predictable response.
• Building a shared communication culture that works under stress.
• Leveraging pen and paper to surface gaps your tools can’t show you.

If your current incident response sometimes feels like a chaotic kitchen during the dinner rush, start small:

• Run a one-hour tabletop with a printed timeline.
• Use a single handwritten runbook as your “menu.”
• Debrief what felt clumsy or unclear.

Over time, these rituals turn your team into a reliable, well-run bistro—one that can handle the lunch rush of production incidents with calm, clarity, and confidence.

The tools can wait. First, set the table.