Storytelling as an Incident Management Skill
summary
Argues that incident narratives must show the logical progression of cause and effect not just who did what and when Tools: architecture diagrams, telemetry graphs, SLOs, on‑call drills and the wheel of Misfortune exercise Examples: a Datadog pipeline stalls because a bad regular expression saturates pod CPU; redirecting traffic and scaling pods sometimes fails, restarting upstream services or blocking the offending query can fix it Postmortems follow scene drama, causal chain, diagnostic steps and concrete action items.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Storytelling in incident management
- 1:05Logical narrative for analysis
- 3:12Troubleshooting stories miss logic
- 4:34Crafting troubleshooting narrative
- 5:35Telling story mid-incident
- 8:27Storytelling before incidents
- 9:29Emotional stories in on-call
- 10:31Wheel of Misfortune exercises
- 11:55Collaborative storytelling during mitigation
- 12:37Real incident case study
- 14:00Checking assumptions with logic
- 15:05Writing engaging postmortems
- 17:55Action items from system progression
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