war-room-protocollisted

# War room protocol A war room concentrates the people and authority to end a crisis into one channel with one commander. Without protocol it becomes a crowded room where twenty engineers narrate the same graph, no one owns the next action, and the decisions that mattered are lost the moment the page clears. The protocol exists to make coordination faster than the incident. ## Method 1. **Name an incident commander first, before any debugging.** The commander runs the response, not the keyboard: they assign work, hold the timeline, and are the single point of decision. Everyone else defers to them on priority. If two people think they are in charge, no one is. 2. **Fill the three other roles explicitly.** An operations lead who drives the technical fix, a scribe who owns the log, and a communications lead who updates status page and stakeholders. Say the names out loud in the channel so the room knows who does what. 3. **Set a fixed sync cadence and hold it.** Every 15 or 30 minutes by severity, the commander calls a checkpoint: current impact, what changed, next action, next check-in time. Between syncs people work, they do not narrate. The cadence is what stops the endless scroll of unstructured chatter. 4. **Keep a running decision log with timestamps.** The scribe records every decision, who made it, why, and what was ruled out. "14:32 rolled back deploy 4471, error rate flat, ruling out config" is a log entry. This is your real-time