Incident Management Trading Cards and Resources

Try your luck with our incident management trading cards—each one tackling a common concept, myth, or best practice in incident response. Play along and test your knowledge!

Below each card, you’ll find blog posts and resources diving deeper into the topic. Whether you’re an SRE, incident manager, or just curious about resilience engineering, these will help you sharpen your skills.

Ready to play? Flip through the cards and explore the insights! 👇

Myth or Fact: Effective incident response should follow a linear, step by step process

Resources:

• Adaptive Tactics in Software Operations: How People Manage Complexity by Asking for Help:
• Wettick, Michael Vincen
• Woods, D. D. (1994). Cognitive demands and activities in dynamic fault management: abductive reasoning and disturbance management. Human factors in alarm design, 63-92.

Myth or Fact: MTTR usefulness

Blogs:

• Why So Mean About MTTR?

Resources:

• 2022 Void Report

Myth or Fact: Most major IT incidents are caused by human error

Resources:

• From Safety-I to Safety-II: A White Paper

Myth or Fact: Attributing an incident to a ‘root cause' is a critical step in understanding an incident

Blogs:

• Discover the ONE Thing You Can Do to Avoid Future Incidents

Resources:

• How complex systems fail by Dr Richard Cook

Myth or Fact: It’s critical to assign the correct severity level during the early stages of an incident

Blogs:

• Incident Groundhog Day

Resources:

• SREcon24 Americas - What Is Incident Severity, but a Lie Agreed Upon?

Myth or Fact: The ultimate goal should be to automate incident response entirely.

Blogs:

• Can Automation Solve All Incidents?

Resources:

• Ironies of Automation: Lisanne Bainbridge

Myth or Fact: Incidents can not be predicted.

Resources:

• How complex systems fail : Dr Richard Cook

Myth or Fact: The fewer incidents you have, the more resilient you are.

Blogs:

• How We Learn: The Value of Simulation in Incident Response

Resources:

• How complex systems fail : Dr Richard Cook
• The Incident Lifecycle: How a Culture of Resilience Can Help You Accomplish Your Goals
• Reader: What Makes "Shallow Incident Data" Shallow
• Reader: Making Sense out of Incident Metrics
• Incidents – Markers of Resilience or Brittleness?

Myth or Fact: The quality of an incident response can be primarily measured by the responders' adherence to the process.

Resources:

• SREcon24 Americas - Real Talk: What We Think We Know — That Just Ain’t So

Myth or Fact: Repeat incidents are a common sign of poor resilience practices

Resources:

• SREcon24 Americas - Real Talk: What We Think We Know — That Just Ain’t So

Myth or Fact: Senior leadership have little or no useful roll to play during incidents.

Blogs:

• When Uptime Went Downtime

Myth or Fact: Across your org’s people, process and technology, your people are likely the greatest source of resillience

Blogs:

• Tech without us: Why there wasn’t an outage today

Resources:

• Building and revising adaptive capacity sharing for technical incident response: A case of resilience engineering

Myth or Fact: Asking the “5 Whys” is the best way of determining root cause.

Blogs:

• Beyond “5 Whys”: A Better Way to Learn from Incidents

Resources:

• The Infinite Hows (or, the Dangers Of The Five Whys)
• Steven Shorrock: "Life After Human Error" - Velocity Europe 2014

Myth or Fact: Resilience And Robustness Are The Same

Myth or Fact: Without Deep Domain Knowledge, Responders Will Be Unable to Perform Effectively.