The Sticky-Note Flight Deck: Running Incident Command From a Wall of Handwritten Flight Plans

When a critical system goes down, most teams instinctively reach for more tools: dashboards, chat ops, runbooks, ticketing systems, paging platforms, war rooms, status pages, and endless browser tabs. Yet during the largest, most stressful incidents, all that technology can start to feel like noise.

What if the key to better incident command wasn’t more tooling, but a low-tech, highly visual “flight deck” wall covered in sticky notes—a literal board of handwritten “flight plans” for the incident?

Borrowing from aviation’s Threat and Error Management (TEM) model and core Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices, we can run adaptive, resilient incident management from something as simple as a whiteboard and Post-its—while still integrating with modern tooling behind the scenes.

This post explores how a sticky-note flight deck can:

• Reduce cognitive overload and coordination toil
• Improve shared situational awareness under pressure
• Encode structured, repeatable workflows in a rapidly evolving environment
• Help teams recover faster from major outages—like many we’ve seen across 2023–2025

Why Modern Incidents Feel Harder Than Ever

From 2023–2025, we’ve seen headline-making outages: global airline disruptions, cloud provider incidents, DNS failures, CDN issues, and fintech and retail downtime costing millions per hour. The pattern is clear:

• Systems are more complex. Microservices, distributed data, feature flags, CI/CD, and multi-cloud all add layers of failure modes.
• Change velocity is higher. Dozens—or hundreds—of deploys per day mean the system you’re debugging now didn’t exist yesterday.
• Dependencies are deeper and more opaque. Third-party APIs, SaaS platforms, and infra providers introduce fragile links outside your direct control.

Traditional, linear incident processes and tool-centric approaches struggle to keep up. Teams need adaptive incident management that:

1. Recognizes changing context rapidly.
2. Coordinates many actors and tools without chaos.
3. Emphasizes learning and resilience over blame and false certainty.

That’s where aviation’s Threat and Error Management philosophy, and a deliberately simple visual system, come in.

From Cockpits to Control Rooms: Threat and Error Management (TEM)

Aviation has spent decades refining how humans manage complex, high-risk systems. One of its core frameworks is Threat and Error Management (TEM), which can be summarized as:

1. Anticipate threats before they cause problems.
2. Trap errors early when they do occur.
3. Recover quickly from undesired states.

Applied to SRE and incident response:

• Threats are conditions that increase the chance of failure (e.g., high load, feature flags recently flipped, a cloud region degraded).
• Errors are human or system actions that deviate from intention (e.g., bad configuration, incomplete rollout, missing alert coverage).
• Undesired states are the outages and degradations users actually feel.

TEM doesn’t pretend you can design error out of the system. Instead, it assumes:

Errors are inevitable. What matters is how early you see them and how effectively you recover.

This mindset maps naturally to the lived reality of SRE teams. And it suggests that during incidents, we should focus less on finding “the” root cause and more on:

• Exposing threats earlier
• Making errors easier to catch
• Structuring recovery so it is fast, safe, and repeatable

Seven Core SRE Reliability Questions to Anchor Your Flight Deck

In fast-moving incidents, you don’t have time for philosophical debates. You need a small set of reliable, repeatable questions that guide action.

Here are seven core SRE reliability questions you can literally put at the top of your flight deck wall:

1. What is broken, and for whom?
   Be concrete: which user flows, which regions, which tenants, which SLIs?

2. How bad is it, and how fast is it changing?
   Are error rates stable, improving, or worsening? Are we breaching SLOs right now or trending toward a breach?

3. What is our safest, fastest path to user impact mitigation?
   Not “fix everything” yet—“stop the bleeding.” Feature kill switch? Rollback? Traffic routing change?

4. What do we believe the system is doing, and where are we least certain?
   Identify knowledge gaps; that’s where to probe and instrument.

5. What experiments or actions can we run next, and what are their risks?
   Hypothesis-driven response, with explicit blast radius evaluation.

6. How are we coordinating work across people and tools?
   Who owns what, how do we avoid duplication, and where is the single source of truth right now?

7. What must we learn from this incident to reduce future toil and impact?
   Not just “root cause,” but conditions and patterns: alert quality, runbook gaps, unsafe defaults.

These questions embody SRE thinking without locking you into a rigid, linear template. They’re a navigation aid—a mental checklist for your flight deck.

The Sticky-Note Flight Deck: A Low-Tech Control Tower

So what is a “sticky-note flight deck” in practice?

Picture a physical or virtual wall divided into clearly labeled lanes. Each sticky note is a small, trackable “flight plan” representing one piece of work, decision, or hypothesis.

You might structure the wall into columns like:

1. Incoming Signals
   New alerts, user reports, and third-party status changes. Each note captures: source, time, and initial assessment.

2. Threats & Constraints
   Recent deploys, known risky components, capacity concerns, maintenance windows, vendor issues.

3. Active Flights (Work in Progress)
   Each note is a clearly scoped task or experiment:

   • “Roll back service X to version 1.2.3 in region A”
   • “Disable feature flag Y for 100% of users”
   • “Capture logs from service Z before restart”

4. Decisions & Checkpoints
   Notes documenting key choices:

   • “Chose rollback over canary because error rate ramping quickly”
   • “Escalated to database team; paging on-call DBA”

5. Mitigations & Recoveries
   Actions that reduced user impact:

   • “Rate limit non-critical API calls by 30%”
   • “Move batch jobs to off-peak window”

6. Follow-Up & Learning
   Post-incident investigations, runbook updates, alert tuning, architectural work.

This board becomes the shared brain of the incident. Anyone walking into the room (or joining remotely via a virtual board) can see:

• What’s happening now
• What’s been tried
• What we think the system is doing
• Where the biggest uncertainties and risks are

Under heavy stress, this visual, tactile approach reduces reliance on individual heroic memory. It also shortens onboarding time for new responders.

Why Low-Tech Beats High-Tech During High-Stress Events

Tooling is essential for observability and automation, but during an intense outage, high-tech interfaces can hide crucial information in tabs, filters, and scrolling logs.

A sticky-note flight deck has several advantages:

1. Radical visibility
   Everything is in one place. No need to ask “Where’s the latest status?” or “Who’s doing what?”

2. Shared situational awareness
   The wall communicates to everyone at once. It anchors discussions and reduces misalignment.

3. Lower cognitive load
   Physical artifacts (or well-designed virtual equivalents) externalize memory. Responders can think instead of just remember.

4. Structured, repeatable workflow
   The lanes and note formats embody a workflow. Even if you adapt on the fly, there’s always a "default way" to proceed.

5. Flexibility and speed
   You can create, move, or kill a sticky note in seconds. No schema changes, no permissions barriers.

Importantly, the flight deck doesn’t replace your tools. It orchestrates them:

• Each note can reference a runbook, graph, or alert ID.
• Actions captured on the board can later be synced to tickets or reports.
• Observability platforms feed “Incoming Signals,” but decisions live on the wall.

Reducing Toil and Reframing Root Cause

SRE talks a lot about toil: repetitive, manual work that scales linearly with system size and adds little enduring value. Incidents are full of toil if left unmanaged:

• Re-explaining context to every new responder
• Redoing the same unsafe manual actions
• Parsing ambiguous chat logs to reconstruct a timeline
• Hunting for the “real” root cause in a complex socio-technical system

A structured flight deck directly attacks this toil:

• Context is centralized on the wall, reducing repeated explanations.
• Repeatable workflows (e.g., standard mitigation playbooks) can be encoded as cards or templates.
• Chronology emerges visually as notes move from signal → action → mitigation → follow-up.

And about root cause: large incidents rarely have a single, neat cause. Instead, they emerge from layered conditions:

• A risky deploy
• A missing or noisy alert
• A brittle dependency
• An overloaded team under time pressure

The flight deck helps teams shift from “What is the one root cause?” to “What were the key contributing conditions and how do we change them to reduce future toil and impact?”

Your follow-up notes should be less about blame and more about:

• Better guardrails (e.g., safer defaults, pre-flight checks)
• Improved visibility (e.g., richer alerts, better dashboards)
• Reduced manual steps (e.g., automation, safer rollbacks)

Making It Real: How to Start Your Own Flight Deck

You don’t need a big program to start. You need:

1. A physical or virtual board visible to everyone involved in incidents.
2. A small, stable set of lanes (like the example above) that express your workflow.
3. Lightweight sticky-note templates, e.g.:
   • Task note: Action, owner, ETA, risk level, link to evidence
   • Signal note: Source, impact, time, confidence
   • Decision note: Choice, alternatives considered, rationale
4. A designated Incident Commander (IC) who:
   • Owns the board during the incident
   • Narrates changes out loud (or in chat)
   • Limits work-in-progress to avoid thrash
5. A short retrospective ritual that:
   • Walks the board from left to right
   • Identifies where threats weren’t anticipated
   • Surfaces where errors weren’t trapped early
   • Captures learning-oriented follow-ups

Over time, you can:

• Tune the lanes and note patterns based on what your team actually does.
• Integrate with digital tools: sync notes to tickets, tie to incident timelines.
• Use board metrics (time in lane, number of abandoned tasks, etc.) to refine your process.

Conclusion: Resilience Is a Practice, Not a Product

The major outages of 2023–2025 reinforce a hard truth: we cannot tool our way out of complexity. Dashboards, AIOps, and automation matter, but they don’t replace the need for:

• Clear, adaptive incident command
• Shared situational awareness under stress
• Thoughtful, human-centered workflows

A sticky-note flight deck may look deceptively simple, but behind it lies a sophisticated mindset:

• Drawing on aviation’s Threat and Error Management to anticipate, trap, and recover.
• Centering on seven core SRE reliability questions instead of chasing mythical root causes.
• Using visual, low-tech tools to encode structured, repeatable workflows that reduce toil and accelerate resolution.

Resilience isn’t about never failing. It’s about how you respond, coordinate, and learn when failure inevitably arrives. Sometimes, the most powerful upgrades to your incident management aren’t more screens—they’re a wall, a marker, and a stack of sticky notes that keep everyone flying the same plane together.