The database is down. Your incident commander starts debugging queries. Your senior engineer alerts everyone on Slack. Three people investigate the same theory simultaneously. Nobody documents what they tried. The issue gets resolved, everyone goes back to work, and nobody talks about what happened.
Two weeks later, the exact same thing occurs.
Why Anti-Patterns Persist
Incident anti-patterns are not accidents. They emerge from reasonable-seeming decisions made under pressure by competent people trying to restore service quickly.
The incident commander who debugs queries is trying to help. The engineer who alerts everyone wants to make sure the right people know. The team that skips documentation is focused on fixing the problem, not recording history.
The issue is not intention. It is that these patterns feel productive in the moment while consistently making incidents worse. They extend mean time to resolution, create coordination chaos, and prevent organizational learning.
Understanding anti-patterns means recognizing why they feel right despite producing poor outcomes. Only then can you build processes that counteract natural human tendencies during high-stress incidents.
Anti-Pattern 1: Incident Commander Fighting Fires
What it looks like: The incident commander who is supposed to coordinate response starts debugging problems, reviewing logs, or deploying fixes themselves.
Why it happens: Senior engineers often become incident commanders, and watching others struggle with problems they could solve creates intense pressure to intervene. Coordinating feels passive when you could be actively fixing.
Why it is harmful: Incident command requires constant attention to who is doing what, what has been tried, and what needs to happen next. The moment you start debugging, you stop coordinating. Work gets duplicated, findings go uncommunicated, and nobody has the full picture.
How to recognize it: Your incident commander disappears into investigation threads for 10-plus minutes without updates. Nobody knows current status. Multiple people pursue the same debugging paths without realizing it.
How to avoid it: Separate coordination from execution explicitly. The incident commander role focuses on communication, delegation, and decision-making—not technical investigation. If the commander has critical expertise, they hand off coordination to someone else before diving into technical work. Treating these as mutually exclusive roles prevents the split-attention trap.
Anti-Pattern 2: No Defined Incident Roles
What it looks like: Everyone jumps into incident response with equal authority. Multiple people investigate, nobody coordinates, and critical tasks get forgotten because everyone assumes someone else is handling them.
Why it happens: Without explicit role assignments, people default to doing what they know how to do. Engineers debug. Managers ask questions. Nobody takes responsibility for coordination, stakeholder communication, or documentation.
Why it is harmful: Lack of role clarity creates duplicated effort and coordination failures. Three engineers chase the same hypothesis while nobody checks related services. Technical teams focus on investigation while stakeholders get no updates and customers have no information.
How to recognize it: Post-incident timelines show multiple people simultaneously investigating the same things. Stakeholders report they had no idea what was happening during the incident. Basic tasks like updating status pages or notifying customers happen late or not at all.
How to avoid it: Define incident roles before incidents occur. At minimum, establish incident commander, technical responders, and communications coordinator roles. When incidents begin, explicitly assign these roles to specific people. Role clarity beats individual heroics every time.
Anti-Pattern 3: Going Silent During Investigation
What it looks like: The team acknowledges the incident, then disappears for 30 minutes while investigating. Stakeholders have no updates. Customers wonder if anyone is working on the problem.
Why it happens: Engineers focus intensely on debugging when systems are broken. Stopping to write updates feels like distraction from the real work of fixing things. The assumption is people will understand you are busy investigating.
Why it is harmful: Silence looks like inaction from the outside. Leadership panics and starts making escalation decisions without current information. Customers lose trust and assume you do not care. Support teams get overwhelmed with inquiries they cannot answer.
How to recognize it: Stakeholders send multiple messages asking for status. Customers report issues on social media before you update status pages. Post-incident feedback mentions poor communication despite good technical response.
How to avoid it: Establish update cadence requirements by severity level. Critical incidents need updates every 15 to 30 minutes even if you just report that investigation continues with no new findings. Delegate communication to a specific person so technical responders can focus on investigation without the team going silent.
Anti-Pattern 4: Skipping Real-Time Documentation
What it looks like: Engineers fix the problem, then try to reconstruct what happened from memory hours or days later for the post-incident review.
Why it happens: During active incidents, documentation feels like overhead that slows response. The priority is restoring service, not writing down what you tried. Teams assume they will remember important details.
Why it is harmful: Memory fails under pressure. Post-incident timelines miss critical details about what was tried, what failed, and why certain decisions were made. This incomplete information prevents accurate root cause analysis and makes it harder to prevent recurrence.
How to recognize it: Post-incident reports are vague or contradictory about what actually happened. Teams cannot explain why certain actions were taken or what alternatives were considered. Investigation findings get lost because nobody documented them.
How to avoid it: Assign someone to document findings in real time during incidents. This person is not investigating—they are capturing what others discover as it happens. Use threaded discussions to organize findings by topic. Accept that documentation slows response slightly while recognizing it dramatically improves post-incident learning.
Anti-Pattern 5: Alert Fatigue From False Positives
What it looks like: Monitoring sends dozens of alerts daily. Most are false positives or low-priority noise. Engineers start ignoring alerts because they learned most are not real problems.
Why it happens: Teams set aggressive monitoring thresholds to catch every possible issue. New monitors get added but old ones never get removed or refined. Nobody wants to be the person who disabled monitoring before a real incident.
Why it is harmful: When real incidents occur, critical alerts get lost in noise or responders take too long to acknowledge because they assume it is another false positive. Alert fatigue kills the effectiveness of monitoring that cost significant time and money to implement.
How to recognize it: Mean time to acknowledge alerts is increasing. Teams mention checking Slack before responding to pages. Post-incident analysis reveals critical alerts were triggered but ignored initially.
How to avoid it: Treat alert quality as a metric. Track false positive rates and require investigation for any alert that fires more than once weekly without indicating real problems. Use consecutive failure thresholds and contextual conditions to reduce noise. Every alert should require action—if it does not, it should not exist.
Anti-Pattern 6: Treating All Incidents the Same
What it looks like: Minor service degradation gets the same response process as complete system failure. Alternatively, critical incidents get downplayed as minor issues to avoid escalation overhead.
Why it happens: Without clear severity definitions, teams make subjective calls about incident importance. Different people have different thresholds for what constitutes major versus minor issues.
Why it is harmful: Over-response to minor issues creates response fatigue and makes people stop taking incident processes seriously. Under-response to critical issues means inadequate coordination for problems that need full organizational attention.
How to recognize it: Post-incident discussions feature debate about whether the incident deserved the response level it received. Teams either mobilize excessively for small issues or fail to escalate serious problems appropriately.
How to avoid it: Define explicit severity levels based on customer impact, affected systems, and business criticality. Document concrete examples of what constitutes each severity level. Train responders to classify incidents consistently. Severity determines response process, not individual judgment calls during crises.
Anti-Pattern 7: Skipping Post-Incident Reviews
What it looks like: The incident resolves, everyone goes back to regular work, and no formal review occurs. If a review happens, it is weeks later when details are forgotten.
Why it happens: Once service is restored, the urgency disappears. Teams have backlogs to address. Writing post-incident reports feels like administrative overhead rather than productive engineering work.
Why it is harmful: Without systematic analysis, teams repeat the same mistakes indefinitely. Critical learnings about tool failures, process gaps, or knowledge deficits never get captured or acted upon.
How to recognize it: The same types of incidents recur with predictable regularity. Teams mention having seen similar problems before but cannot recall specifics. Action items from previous incidents do not exist or never got completed.
How to avoid it: Make post-incident reviews non-negotiable parts of incident resolution. Schedule review meetings within 48 hours while details are fresh. Treat review completion as the actual end of incident response, not service restoration. Track action item completion rates as a team health metric.
Anti-Pattern 8: Blame-Focused Post-Mortems
What it looks like: Post-incident discussions focus on who made mistakes, who should have caught issues, or who needs better training. Engineers become defensive rather than analytical.
Why it happens: Organizations conflate accountability with blame. When leadership asks how something happened, teams interpret this as looking for someone to hold responsible.
Why it is harmful: Blame destroys the psychological safety needed for honest incident analysis. Engineers hide mistakes, minimize their involvement, and provide sanitized versions of events. The organization loses access to accurate information about what actually happened.
How to recognize it: Post-incident reports avoid mentioning specific actions or decisions. Engineers are reluctant to be incident commanders. People volunteer less information during reviews than they did during active response.
How to avoid it: Explicitly frame all post-incident analysis as blameless. Focus discussion on system gaps rather than individual actions. Ask what information was missing or what process would have prevented the issue—not who was involved. Treat honest reporting as valuable regardless of the news it contains.
Anti-Pattern 9: Poor External Communication
What it looks like: Customers discover outages from system behavior or social media rather than proactive notification. Status pages update late or provide generic information without specifics about impact.
Why it happens: Teams focus on fixing technical problems and treat customer communication as secondary. Nobody feels ownership over status page updates or customer messaging.
Why it is harmful: Customers lose trust in your reliability and transparency. Support teams get overwhelmed with inquiries. Sales deals get delayed because prospects question your operational maturity.
How to recognize it: Customer complaints mention finding out about issues from social media or only after experiencing problems themselves. Support tickets spike during incidents because customers cannot get information from official channels.
How to avoid it: Assign external communication responsibility to a specific role during incidents. Establish status page update requirements for different severity levels. Maintain communication templates that make customer updates fast to publish. Treat customer communication as part of incident resolution, not optional followup.
Anti-Pattern 10: Hero Culture and Knowledge Hoarding
What it looks like: Critical systems knowledge exists in one or two people’s heads. When complex incidents occur, everyone waits for the expert to wake up, log in, or return from vacation.
Why it happens: Expertise naturally concentrates in people who built systems or responded to their incidents repeatedly. Documenting that knowledge feels less urgent than building new features. Experts enjoy being needed and do not realize their knowledge creates organizational fragility.
Why it is harmful: Hero culture creates single points of failure in incident response. Mean time to resolution increases when experts are unavailable. Team scaling is impossible because new engineers cannot respond effectively to incidents.
How to recognize it: Certain people get paged for most incidents involving specific systems. Incidents that occur during their time off take significantly longer to resolve. New team members express frustration about not understanding systems well enough to help during incidents.
How to avoid it: Require runbook documentation for all critical systems. Rotate incident command and response responsibilities to spread knowledge. During incidents, have experts guide others through investigation rather than solving problems themselves. Measure knowledge distribution as a team health metric.
Breaking Free From Anti-Patterns
Individual awareness does not eliminate anti-patterns. These patterns persist because they align with natural human responses to stress and organizational incentives.
Breaking anti-patterns requires process changes that make good practices easier than bad ones:
Before incidents:
- Define roles and assign them at incident start
- Create communication templates that reduce cognitive load
- Document runbooks for critical systems
- Establish severity level definitions with concrete examples
During incidents:
- Use threaded discussions to organize findings
- Enforce update cadence requirements by severity
- Separate coordination from investigation responsibilities
- Document decisions and actions in real time
After incidents:
- Make post-incident reviews non-negotiable
- Focus analysis on system gaps, not individual blame
- Track and complete action items systematically
- Measure improvement in incident patterns over time
Building Better Incident Response
Platforms like UpStat support structured incident response that counteracts common anti-patterns through explicit process design.
Severity level classification helps teams avoid treating all incidents the same, while clear incident roles prevent coordination chaos that emerges when everyone investigates without structure.
Threaded comment systems organize investigation findings, stakeholder updates, and customer communication separately—preventing the information overload that causes teams to go silent or skip documentation during active response.
Real-time activity timelines capture what happened automatically, eliminating the memory reconstruction problem that makes post-incident reviews incomplete or inaccurate.
Conclusion: Process Beats Heroics
Anti-patterns are not character flaws. They are predictable organizational responses to stress and ambiguity.
The teams that respond effectively to incidents are not staffed with superhuman engineers who never fall into these traps. They are teams that built processes which make anti-patterns difficult to execute and good practices the path of least resistance.
Identify which anti-patterns show up in your incident response. Pick one or two to eliminate first. Build explicit process changes that counteract them. Measure whether incidents improve.
Fixing anti-patterns is not exciting work. It will not make a good conference talk. But it is the work that transforms chaotic incident response into systematic operational excellence—and that compounds value over every incident your team will ever face.
Explore In Upstat
Eliminate incident anti-patterns with structured severity levels, clear role assignments, threaded collaboration, and real-time documentation that keeps response organized even under pressure.