High severity incidents are chaotic, fast moving, and high stakes. The incident coordinators who handle them well are not just naturally calm under pressure. They have trained themselves to recognize patterns, make decisions quickly, and act with confidence.
The obvious question is how you build that skill without constantly being in the middle of major incidents.
The answer is not more chaos. It is developing a deep understanding of your systems, training your brain to recognize patterns, and practicing how to assemble small pieces of information into something coherent.
Know what normal looks like
To recognize what is broken, you first need to know what healthy looks like.
That means developing real familiarity with dashboards, metrics, and system behavior during normal operation. If you can glance at a dashboard and know within ten seconds that everything looks healthy, you can also tell just as quickly when something is off.
Many engineers focus narrowly on their own area and rely on dashboards that average metrics over five or ten minutes. That is often too slow for incident response. Incident coordinators need a feel for immediate signals of distress, not smoothed trends after the fact.
Develop pattern recognition through chunking
Earlier in my career as a musician, I reached a point where I was no longer reading individual notes. I could look at a bar, or several bars, of music at once. I had moved from reading notes to reading patterns.
This is an example of chunking..1
Chunking is a cognitive strategy where the brain groups related pieces of information into larger, more meaningful units. It is how we remember a phone number as 604 555 0199 instead of a long string of digits. It is also how experienced engineers see a traffic spike and database connection saturation as backpressure, not as two unrelated alerts.
In high severity incidents, chunking allows you to:
- Reduce cognitive load by focusing on patterns instead of raw data
- React faster by collapsing dozens of signals into a familiar shape
- Avoid tunnel vision by scanning for known categories of failure
By deliberately training on common failure modes such as deploy regressions, cascading timeouts, or broken canaries, you build a mental catalog. Under pressure, you are no longer starting from scratch. You are matching what you see to something you already understand.
Build small pieces, then assemble faster
Think of this like working with LEGO bricks. You practice recognizing small pieces of information until you can stack them together quickly into a coherent picture.
Over time, you become more comfortable in high severity incidents, not because you have lived through endless crises, but because you have built the mental models needed to respond effectively.
When you train your brain to recognize patterns and assemble them quickly, you can step into an incident with confidence without needing to live in crisis mode.