The Pencil-Drawn Incident Garden: Growing Reliability Rituals From Hand-Sketched Failure Seeds

We usually meet incidents in the worst possible light: flashing pagers, tense calls, dashboards full of red. Afterward, we rush to patch, document just enough, and move on—hoping not to see that pattern again.

But what if we treated every incident like a small, imperfect seed? Not a token of failure to be hidden away, but a seed to be sketched, examined, and deliberately planted in the garden of our reliability practice.

This is the idea behind pencil-drawn failure seeds and the incident garden: using narrative, sketching, and ritual to transform how teams think about reliability.

Why Pencil-Drawn “Failure Seeds”?

Imagine you just had a production outage. Before you open a template or write a formal postmortem, you grab a pencil and a blank sheet of paper.

You draw:

• A small seed labeled "API latency spike"
• A tangled root system labeled "cascading timeouts"
• A dark cloud overhead labeled "missing alert on saturation"
• A gardener (your team) holding tools labeled "runbooks", "feature flags", "SLOs"

In five minutes, you’ve created a visual metaphor of what happened and what could grow from it.

This simple act does several powerful things:

• Reframes the incident – It’s no longer just “the day the database died,” but a seed of insight we can plant and tend.
• Softens blame – Seeds aren’t evil; they’re potential. We focus on conditions and care, not individual guilt.
• Invites conversation – A sketch is easier to react to than a wall of text. People point at parts, ask questions, and add ideas.

The pencil matters too: it is intentionally rough and erasable, signaling that we’re exploring, not finalizing.

Storytelling as Reliability Therapy

Modern reliability is full of intimidating language: distributed consensus, backpressure, causal tracing, eventual consistency. These are important—but they’re not always the best way to start a human conversation after a stressful outage.

Instead, we can borrow from therapy and storytelling traditions:

• Metaphors – “Our cache behaved like a gossip network with no source of truth” is more memorable than “cache invalidation error.”
• Characters – The job scheduler becomes “the overworked traffic cop”; the deploy pipeline becomes “the conveyor belt that never sleeps.”
• Journeys – The incident is a story with a beginning (trigger), middle (spread), and end (recovery and learning).

These therapy-style metaphors do not replace technical detail; they wrap it in a narrative that people can internalize and recall under pressure.

Every culture uses parables, analogies, and fables to transmit important norms: “crying wolf,” “the tortoise and the hare,” “the boy who drew a circle in the sand.” Reliability culture is no different. Over time, incidents become internal parables:

• “This is just like the Black Friday cache meltdown—remember how we survived that by tightening SLOs and adding backpressure?”
• “We’re walking into ‘the silent alert’ territory again—last time, no one owned the metric.”

Metaphors convert abstract reliability principles into emotionally charged, sticky stories that actually influence behavior.

The Technical Soil: DevOps as the Garden Bed

If incidents are seeds, they still need soil to grow into something useful. In modern systems, that soil is DevOps practice.

Core DevOps capabilities create an environment where reliability rituals can take root:

• Continuous Integration (CI) – Makes it easy to capture lessons as tests. When a failure seed teaches you about a boundary condition, you add a test to CI. The garden gains another healthy plant.
• Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CD) – Enables safe, frequent change. You can respond to insights quickly, rather than letting seeds rot in backlogs.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – Turns learning into versioned, reviewable configuration changes, rather than tribal knowledge.

In poor soil—manual deployments, brittle environments, slow change—your incident rituals will wither. People simply won’t have the bandwidth or confidence to plant and tend new practices.

So before asking, “Why aren’t our post-incident rituals working?” it’s worth asking, “Is our DevOps soil healthy enough for anything to grow?”

Observability: Seeing the Garden Clearly

Drawing a failure seed assumes you understand the plant you’re sketching. Without monitoring and observability, you’re just guessing at shapes.

Reliability gardens grow best when our tools give us:

• Rich telemetry – Logs, metrics, traces, profiles that show what actually happened, not just what we think happened.
• Correlated views – The ability to follow a user request through services, or a spike in CPU back to a specific deploy.
• Historical context – How today’s incident compares to last week’s or last year’s.

Observability tools supply the data needed to sketch accurate incident gardens:

• You can draw where the fault started in the system.
• You can show how it propagated through dependencies.
• You can visualize who was impacted (SLOs, user segments, regions).

The better your observability, the more faithful your incident sketches—and the more fertile your learning.

Turning Incidents into Reusable Seeds

Not every incident deserves a full ceremony. But significant or recurring incidents should trigger a structured lessons-learned process.

A simple pattern:

1. Capture the seed

   • Sketch the incident garden: key components, triggers, and outcomes.
   • Write a short narrative: "Once upon a deploy, our checkout latency grew…"

2. Clarify the conditions

   • What soil issues were present? (technical debt, lack of tests, unclear ownership)
   • What weather influenced it? (traffic spikes, third-party outages, org changes)

3. Name the pattern

   • Give it a memorable label: "The Hidden Timeout Seed", "The Orphaned Alert Seed", "The Overconfident Rollout Seed."
   • This turns it into a reusable story you can reference later.

4. Plant the improvements

   • New guardrails (tests, alerts, SLOs, circuit breakers).
   • Process changes (ownership clarification, better handoffs).
   • Documentation updates (runbooks, design docs).

5. Store the seed packet

   • Put the sketch, story, and changes somewhere discoverable: an incident library, internal wiki, or reliability playbook.

Over time, your organization builds a catalog of seeds and stories. New engineers can walk through the incident garden and learn not just what went wrong, but how the team chose to grow from it.

Ritualized Post-Incident Reviews: Tending the Garden

A seed is only as valuable as the ritual that nurtures it. That’s where regular, structured post-incident reviews come in.

Elements of a healthy reliability ritual:

• Psychological safety first

  • Begin with a clear statement: “We are here to understand system behavior and our context, not to assign personal blame.”
  • Use blameless language: “The code path made it easy to…” instead of “You forgot to…”

• One visual, one story

  • Start each review by showing the pencil sketch of the incident.
  • Have someone briefly narrate the story in everyday language before diving into graphs and timelines.

• Consistent structure
  Typical sections:

  • What did we expect to happen?
  • What actually happened?
  • What helped us detect, diagnose, and recover?
  • What made it harder?
  • What will we plant (actions) and how will we know they grew (follow-up)?

• Ritualized follow-through

  • Limit action items to what you realistically can do.
  • Assign clear owners and due dates.
  • Revisit key seeds in later reviews: “Did this plant ever sprout?”

When these rituals become routine, they:

• Normalize talking about failure openly and constructively.
• Turn fear into curiosity.
• Make learning continuous rather than crisis-driven.

In other words, they cultivate a culture of ongoing learning, resilience, and psychological safety.

Bringing the Incident Garden to Your Team

To start growing your own incident garden, you don’t need new tools—just a few deliberate changes:

1. Add a sketch step to your post-incident checklist.

   • One person draws a simple, pencil-style diagram of the incident before the review.

2. Name your seeds.

   • Give each major incident a metaphorical name that captures its lesson.

3. Create a visible garden.

   • A physical wall in the office or a virtual board with incident sketches and short stories.

4. Tie seeds to soil.

   • For each incident, explicitly connect the lessons to CI/CD, IaC, or observability improvements.

5. Tell the stories.

   • Use the parables in onboarding, design reviews, and planning.
   • When you see familiar patterns emerging, reference past seeds.

Conclusion: From Fear of Failure to Curiosity About Growth

Incidents will never be fun. But they can be profoundly valuable if we treat them as more than isolated emergencies.

By:

• Sketching pencil-drawn failure seeds,
• Wrapping complex reliability ideas in stories and metaphors,
• Cultivating DevOps practices as the soil,
• Using observability to draw accurate gardens, and
• Practicing structured, ritualized reviews,

we shift the organizational mindset from “Who broke it?” to “What can we grow from this?”

In that shift lies the real power of the incident garden: a living, evolving landscape of shared stories and concrete practices that make your systems—and your teams—steadily more resilient.

All it takes to begin is a pencil, a story, and the willingness to see failure as a seed instead of a scar.