The Pencil-And-Post-It Incident Labyrinth: Designing a Zero-Tool Drill for Your Next Pager Storm

When your systems are burning and the pager storm hits at 3 a.m., what happens if everything you rely on to coordinate the response is also on fire?

No Slack. No Zoom. No Jira. No incident bot. No dashboards. Just a ringing phone, a whiteboard, and a stack of Post-its.

That uncomfortable image is exactly why you should be intentionally running zero-tool incident drills: structured simulations where you assume that all primary systems and collaboration tools are unavailable—and you practice responding anyway.

This is not just a fun chaos-engineering stunt. It’s a core resilience capability. Because in a real cyber crisis or large-scale outage, your sleek digital command center might evaporate, but your customers will still expect you to act like you know what you’re doing.

Why Design Zero-Tool Drills at All?

Most organizations unintentionally optimize for “everything works perfectly.” Incident response is often rehearsed with:

Full observability and dashboards
Real-time chat channels
Automated incident tickets and routing
Integrated runbooks and bots

That’s valuable—but incomplete. Tool-augmented response is not the same as tool-independent response. When the tools disappear, teams often discover:

No one knows who actually declares the incident level
Contact information lives only in cloud-based systems that are offline
Roles and responsibilities are vague without the incident bot assigning them
Decisions stall because no one can see the same data in one place

A zero-tool drill surfaces these weaknesses before a real disaster does.

Analogue Readiness: Why Pen and Paper Still Matter

In major cyber incidents and widespread outages, response often regresses to surprisingly simple tools:

Pens and paper notebooks for logs and timelines
Post-its for tasks, ownership, and priorities
Whiteboards or flip charts for shared situational awareness
Printed contact trees and org charts for escalation
Physical runbooks and playbooks for critical procedures

This analogue layer is not a relic; it’s a deliberate safety net. Digital tools are amplifiers: they make good processes great and bad processes chaotic. But when they vanish, the underlying process is all you have.

If your process only exists inside the tools, you don’t actually have a process—you have a dependency.

The Core Idea: Manual First, Automation Second

Zero-tool drills force you to answer a simple question:

“If all our automation disappeared, how would we still run a competent incident response?”

That leads to three design principles:

Pre-defined manual processes – Clear, step-by-step procedures that can be executed with nothing more than a phone and paper.
Low-tech execution – Runbooks, checklists, and contact trees that are printable and usable offline.
Practice until it’s muscle memory – Regular drills so people don’t freeze when the bots are silent.

Automation is then layered on top of a solid manual backbone—never instead of it.

Borrowing from SRE: Roles and Rituals, Minus the Tools

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and modern incident management offer a proven structure: roles, rituals, and playbooks. You can adapt these patterns directly into your offline drills.

At a minimum, design your zero-tool incident around these roles:

Incident Commander (IC)
Owns the response, sets priorities, manages time, and makes final calls.
Operations / Tech Lead
Coordinates diagnosis and remediation work across systems.
Communications Lead
Handles updates to stakeholders, leadership, and possibly customers.
Scribe / Timeline Owner
Maintains a written log of events, decisions, and actions.

In everyday incidents, these roles may be partially automated or informally assigned in chat. In a zero-tool drill, you deliberately assign and rotate them using only analogue means.

Rituals you should keep, even offline:

First 5 minutes: Confirm roles, define the incident, and set an immediate objective.
Regular status huddles: Every 10–15 minutes, gather, review current status, and re-prioritize.
Explicit decisions: Write major decisions and rationales on the whiteboard or in a physical log.
Clear end condition: Define what “stabilized” means and who declares it.

If you can execute these consistently without tools, you’re much less fragile when they fail.

Designing Your First Zero-Tool Drill

You don’t need to start with a catastrophic scenario. What matters is that no one is allowed to depend on normal tooling.

1. Define Your Constraints

Set the rules of the game:

No Slack, Teams, or equivalent chat
No video conferencing tools
No incident management platform / bots
No ticketing system during the exercise
Limited or no access to production dashboards (or simulate this)

Allow basic communication channels you’d realistically still have, e.g.:

Phone calls (mobile and landline)
SMS
In-person communication

2. Prepare Your Analogue Toolkit

Before the drill, assemble physical materials:

Printed incident roles and responsibilities
A paper incident timeline template (start time, event, actor)
Printed contact tree (on-call engineers, leaders, vendors)
Printed runbooks for common failure scenarios
Whiteboards / flip charts, markers, and Post-its

The rule of thumb: if it’s critical during a major incident, it should have a printable representation.

3. Choose a Scenario

Select a realistic, high-stakes problem, for example:

Widespread authentication failure
DNS misconfiguration cutting off external access
Cloud provider region experiencing major degradation
Ransomware detected in a core environment

For a first drill, lean slightly simpler on the technical side and focus on the coordination challenge.

4. Run It Like a Real Pager Storm

Simulate the chaos:

Trigger the drill like a genuine page (within agreed boundaries)
Assign initial roles (IC, Tech Lead, Comms Lead, Scribe)
Use phones and in-person huddles as your primary channels
Capture actions and status on whiteboards and in physical logs
Enforce time pressure and competing priorities

Importantly: no cheating. If someone reaches for Slack “just to clarify something,” treat it as if the service is offline.

5. Debrief Ruthlessly

Immediately after the drill, hold a structured retrospective. Focus on:

Where did communication break down?
What decisions were delayed—and why?
Did people know where to find contact info and runbooks?
Were roles clear? Did the IC feel overloaded or unsupported?
What information did everyone wish they had, but couldn’t access?

Turn these into concrete follow-ups:

New or improved printed runbooks
Updated contact trees and escalation paths
Clarified role definitions and backups
Checklists for “first 15 minutes” and “declaring all-clear”

Repeating the Labyrinth: Building Muscle Memory

One zero-tool drill is a wake-up call. A series of them is muscle building.

Treat these as part of your regular operational practice:

Run a zero-tool mini-drill quarterly per major team
Reserve one larger cross-functional exercise annually
Rotate the Incident Commander role across different people
Vary the scenarios: cyber incidents, vendor outages, internal change gone wrong

Over time, you’ll see:

Faster, more confident role assignment
Cleaner, more structured communication even when tools exist
Teams defaulting to checklists and playbooks instead of improvisation
More thoughtful use of automation, because they understand the manual baseline

The goal isn’t to become anti-tool. It’s to ensure that tools are optional accelerators, not single points of failure.

Combining Automation with Robust Manual Fallbacks

After a few zero-tool drills, you’ll likely redesign some of your digital tooling:

Incident bots that mirror critical information onto printable summaries
Ticketing systems that export offline-ready contact trees and roles
Dashboards that can be snapshot-exported regularly (e.g., PDFs)
Runbooks that begin with a “manual mode” section: what to do if the platform is down

This is the sweet spot:

Automated capabilities for speed and scale when everything’s working
Robust manual fallbacks for when those capabilities vanish

Resilient operations don’t assume the tools will always be there. They assume the opposite, and work backwards.

Conclusion: Practice Getting Lost So You Can Find Your Way

The “pencil-and-Post-it incident labyrinth” is not a hypothetical worst-case; it’s a realistic mode you may be forced into during a serious outage or cyber event.

Designing and running zero-tool drills doesn’t just prepare you for that specific scenario. It:

Exposes hidden dependencies on tools
Forces clarity in roles and decision-making
Strengthens your process so that automation has a solid foundation
Gives your team confidence that they can still operate in the dark

In your next planning cycle, don’t just schedule another standard incident rehearsal with all the dashboards glowing and bots humming. Schedule at least one analogue-only pager storm.

Walk the labyrinth with nothing but pencil and Post-its—so when the real storm hits, you already know the way out.