2026-02-08
Designing incident drills that do not feel like improv comedy
By Yuri Ahn
Incidents Facilitation
Early versions of our incident drills leaned on whimsical disaster names. Participants remembered the jokes, not the roles. We renamed scenarios after mundane infrastructure events and tightened facilitator scripts to stay neutral.
Each drill now opens with a single paragraph of context, a wall-clock deadline, and explicit "out of scope" notes so teams do not spiral into fantasy outages. Scribes use a fixed timeline template so the debrief compares predicted versus actual sequencing.
We still use mild stress: timers stay visible, and facilitators may inject one mid-drill twist that appears in the printed runbook. The twist is always documented ahead of time for fairness.
If your culture prefers lighter tone, facilitators can adjust language, but we discourage meme-heavy slides in official materials.