The Pencil-Drawn Incident Compass Rose: Tiny Rituals That Align Every On‑Call

If you’ve been on call long enough, you know the feeling: pager goes off, adrenaline spikes, context disappears. In those moments, your brain narrows to the alert in front of you, not the bigger picture. Are you optimizing for speed? Safety? Customer impact? Long‑term reliability? It’s easy to say “all of the above,” but in real incidents, tradeoffs are everywhere.

This is where a surprisingly low‑tech tool becomes powerful: a pencil‑drawn incident compass rose—a tiny, hand‑sketched reminder of what actually matters when things go wrong.

In this post, we’ll explore how a compass rose metaphor, visual artifacts, and small, repeatable rituals can:

Align every on‑call engineer toward the same reliability goals
Reduce burnout by clarifying expectations and priorities
Turn abstract reliability ideals into concrete, repeatable behavior

Why a “Compass Rose” for Incidents?

A compass rose—that star‑like diagram on maps showing North, South, East, and West—does one thing really well: it tells you which direction you’re supposed to move.

Incidents are a form of navigation under stress. You’re dropped into confusing terrain and forced to move quickly. Without a shared compass, every on‑call might:

Optimize for different goals (e.g., speed vs. safety)
Use different mental models of “what good looks like”
Make inconsistent tradeoffs that frustrate the team and customers

The metaphor works because, just like a physical compass, your incident rituals can be aligned to a “true north”—your clearly defined reliability goals and priorities.

If your team hasn’t explicitly articulated these, you don’t have a compass; you have guesses.

Defining Your True North: Reliability Goals and Priorities

Before you sketch anything, you need to decide: What are we actually pointing toward?

Examples of “true north” statements for incident handling might include:

Protect customer impact first. “If customers are significantly impacted, we favor fast, conservative action—even if it temporarily increases technical debt.”
Favor safe reversibility. “We prefer actions that are easy to roll back over risky, hard-to-undo changes, especially under uncertainty.”
Keep humans sustainable. “We treat burnout risk as a reliability risk; degraded human systems are as dangerous as degraded technical systems.”
Bias toward communication. “We keep stakeholders informed early and often, even if the message is ‘we’re still investigating.’”

Write down 3–5 such principles. These form the cardinal directions of your incident compass rose.

Then ask:

Would every on‑call engineer make similar tradeoffs using these?
Are these principles visible in how we design our on‑call schedule and runbooks?

If not, that’s your first alignment problem.

The Underestimated Leverage: On‑Call Schedule Design

You can design the best incident rituals in the world, but if your on‑call schedule is brutal, your reliability practices will fail in practice.

On‑call schedule design is a reliability control. It directly shapes:

Team health and burnout risk – Exhausted people make riskier choices, skip steps, and stop improving systems.
Incident quality – A tired on‑call is slower to see patterns, more likely to tunnel on the wrong hypothesis, and less likely to communicate clearly.
Willingness to volunteer for on‑call – If the schedule feels exploitative, senior engineers will quietly avoid it, and you’ll lose resilience.

A healthy, aligned schedule might include:

Reasonable rotation length (e.g., 1 week on, several weeks off)
Explicit handoff rituals (short handoff doc, quick sync call, or Slack note)
Clear backup roles (primary, secondary, incident commander)
Protected recovery time after intense incidents (half‑day off, or reduced meeting load)

When you design schedules, ask:

If our true north is long‑term reliability, does this schedule move us toward it or away from it?

If you say “our people are our most critical reliability asset” but your schedule burns them out, your compass is already lying.

Tiny Rituals: Making Good Decisions Under Stress

Under stress, people don’t rise to the occasion, they fall to their rituals.

That’s why teams that respond consistently well to incidents tend to have small, repeatable “tiny rituals” that:

Reduce cognitive load
Provide defaults when unsure
Encode shared values into quick actions

These rituals don’t have to be elaborate. They just need to be:

Visible – People remember to use them.
Repeatable – They’re easy to do, even half‑asleep.
Aligned – They reflect the team’s true north.

Some example tiny rituals:

A 60‑second pre‑incident checklist when you pick up the pager:
- “Have I checked active incidents?”
- “Is there an incident channel?”
- “Do we have a clear commander?”
A default triage sequence: check status page → error rate graphs → recent deploys → known runbooks.
A standard escalation decision rule: “If the impact is above X or you’re stuck for > Y minutes, escalate without shame.”
A post‑incident reflection prompt: “Did I follow the compass? Where did I feel pulled off course?”

These are small, but they compound. They’re your steps in the direction the compass points.

The Hand‑Drawn Compass Rose: A Visual Reliability Anchor

Now, let’s bring in the pencil.

Digital tools are everywhere, but hand‑sketched artifacts have a particular power:

They feel personal and human
They’re easy to adapt and annotate
They turn abstract values into something literally visible on your desk or notebook

Imagine each on‑call engineer has a hand‑drawn compass rose on a notepad or whiteboard near their workstation.

The compass has 4 main directions, plus diagonals if you like. Each direction is labeled with one of your key incident principles. For example:

North – Protect Customers
Minimize user-visible impact first. Favor safe, fast mitigations.
East – Preserve Safety & Reversibility
Avoid high‑risk changes under uncertainty. Prefer reversible actions.
South – Sustain Humans
Respect fatigue; escalate early; don’t hero through exhaustion.
West – Communicate Clearly
Keep stakeholders informed. Share status, even if incomplete.

You might add diagonals like:

NE – Mitigate Now, Fix Later
SW – Learn & Improve (capturing follow‑up tasks, post‑incident reviews)

This isn’t art class. It’s alignment.

The act of drawing it yourself matters: it’s a mini‑ritual of commitment. You’re not just reading a policy doc; you’re externalizing your mental model onto paper.

Place that drawing where you can see it while you’re on call. During incidents, glance at it and ask:

What direction am I currently moving in?
Am I ignoring one axis entirely (e.g., burning myself out to protect customers)?
Does this decision point toward our true north or just “make this graph look better fast”?

Over time, the compass becomes a tangible, memorable artifact of how your team does reliability.

Standardizing Mental Models Across Every On‑Call

The real power of the incident compass rose is that it synchronizes mental models.

Without shared alignment rituals, two equally skilled engineers might:

Make different tradeoffs in identical situations
Escalate at inconsistent thresholds
Write very different post‑incident narratives about what mattered

By contrast, if every on‑call:

Has drawn the same compass rose
Has practiced the same tiny rituals
Refers to the same true north principles

…then behavior during incidents becomes far more predictable and consistent.

This isn’t about removing individual judgment. It’s about ensuring everyone:

Frames problems within the same decision‑making scaffold
Understands why certain tradeoffs are preferred
Feels psychologically safe escalating, communicating, or saying “I need help”

In other words, the compass rose helps guarantee that no matter who picks up the pager, they’re oriented the same way.

How to Introduce an Incident Compass Rose to Your Team

You can start small. Here’s a lightweight approach:

Clarify Your True North
- In a team meeting, draft 3–5 incident principles.
- Make them concrete enough to guide real tradeoffs.
Co‑Design the Compass Rose
- Sketch a rough compass with those principles as directions.
- Iterate together—this is about shared ownership, not leadership decree.
Create a Tiny Ritual Around It
- At the start of each new on‑call shift, the engineer redraws the compass in their notebook or on a sticky note.
- During an incident, the commander can explicitly reference it: “Right now we’re prioritizing North: protect customers. We’ll schedule South/West—human recovery and learning—after we stabilize.”
Align the Schedule and Processes
- Adjust your on‑call schedule and escalation rules so they don’t conflict with the compass.
- For example, if you value human sustainability, build in rest after high‑severity incidents.
Revisit After Real Incidents
- In post‑incident reviews, ask: “Did our actions reflect our compass? Where did the compass feel wrong?”
- Update the compass directions as your understanding of reliability evolves.

Conclusion: Tiny, Hand‑Drawn, and Surprisingly Powerful

You don’t need a new platform, AI, or dashboard to make your incident response better. You need alignment.

A simple, pencil‑drawn incident compass rose and a few deliberate tiny rituals can:

Anchor every on‑call engineer to the same reliability goals
Make your tradeoffs intentional instead of accidental
Reduce burnout by respecting human limits as a core reliability concern
Turn vague values like “customer focus” and “learning culture” into specific, visible behaviors

Incidents will always be stressful. But they don’t have to be directionless. If you give every engineer the same compass—and the time to draw it themselves—you’ll find your team moving more consistently, sustainably, and confidently toward true reliability.