5 Incident Management Lessons To Carry Into 2026

2025 felt like the year incident management finally got the respect it deserves. Not just as something IT teams deal with when things break, but as a core business function that protects revenue, reputation and customer trust. This year, we saw major global outages that reminded everyone how fragile digital systems really are. The difference between the teams that were prepared and those that weren’t quickly became obvious. The most prepared teams had runbooks, clear escalation paths and practiced responses. When incidents hit, they knew exactly what to do. Unprepared teams scrambled, wasted time figuring out who on the team owned which tasks and watched small problems grow into big ones. After watching thousands of incident responses play out across industries this year, here are five lessons that stood out. 1. The Best Engineer Shouldn’t Be Running the Incident When the most technical person is coordinating an incident while debugging the problem, neither role gets done well. The incident commander (IC) role is about clear thinking under pressure, communication and decision-making. The IC assesses risk, decides what needs to be escalated, keeps stakeholders informed and coordinates people. Those are leadership decisions. The best incident responses have clear role separation. The IC orchestrates, subject matter experts handle technical work, scribes document and customer liaisons manage external communications. Everyone knows their job and stays in their lane. Here’s the problem: Most organizations don’t have enough people trained to be ICs and have to default to whoever’s on call or whoever has the most technical knowledge. That needs to change. These are learnable skills that can be developed across the organization, not just in engineering. 2. AI and Automation Help, but Humans Still Make the Calls AI has gotten very good at eliminating the tedious parts of incident management. Machine learning (ML) correlates thousands of alerts into meaningful signals and filters out noise. Agentic AI transcribes incident calls, detects on-call conflicts with PTO and handles replacements, provides proactive recommendations from incident patterns, and can even triage and diagnose incidents autonomously. Generative AI (GenAI) analyzes chat history and incident data to draft status updates and generate post-incident review summaries to complete the incident life cycle. The organizations getting the most value pair this with event-driven automation that processes events, triggers workflows and executes responses. Humans stay in the loop for high-impact decisions that could significantly affect customers or systems. This works because it combines machine speed with human accountability. 3. Learning From Incidents Compounds Over Time Most post-incident reviews are theater. Teams gather, talk about what broke, write action items that may or may not get done and move on. Three months later, something similar breaks and everyone acts surprised. Organizations that really improved in 2025 treated incident reviews differently. They pulled data from everywhere, including incident timelines, chat transcripts, video recordings and change logs. When teams analyze all that together, they’re able to see patterns they would miss otherwise. When teams learn and turn learnings into automated workflows, the effect compounds. Incident A teaches one thing and a response is automated, which then prevents Incident B. When Incident C occurs, automation handles it before waking anyone up. Each incident makes the system smarter. 4. Alert Fatigue Is a System Design Problem If engineers are getting paged constantly for low-priority stuff, that is a result of system design failure. Many organizations hit a wall with on-call culture. The old model of “page everyone for everything” worked when they only had five engineers. It falls apart completely at 50 or 500. People burn out, they start ignoring alerts, response times get slower and good people leave. PagerDuty research found that IT leaders estimated the true cost of downtime to be $4,537 per minute. If the team is drowning in alerts, they won’t be ready when a critical incident hits, and every minute of downtime will cost the organization. The solution lies in intelligent systems that filter noise before it reaches humans. ML that correlates related alerts so that engineers get one notification instead of 50. Smart routing that sends incidents to the right team. Dynamic escalation that adapts based on who is actually available. Organizations should let AI do the initial triage to prevent alerts that are informational, duplicates or self-resolving from reaching the team, saving human judgment for when there is actually a decision to make. 5. Every Department Needs Incident Management This was probably the biggest shift in 2025. Incident management practices spread beyond IT into customer support, security and business operations. When a major customer-facing issue happens, support teams need the same things engineering needs: clear roles, fast mobilization, good communication, coordination across teams and post-incident analysis to prevent recurrence. Security incidents have operated in their own silo, even though the orchestration principles are the same as IT incidents. That’s changing now. While stakeholders and workflows may differ between security and IT, the underlying incident response structure is universal. When customer support can trigger engineering response workflows directly and engineering can update support tickets automatically, everyone moves faster. What This Means for 2026 The common thread through all five lessons is treating incident management as a strategic capability worth investing in instead of as a reactive necessity. The organizations that invested in this during 2025 saw measurable improvements in resolution times, team burnout rates and customer satisfaction scores. More importantly, they built systems that get stronger with each incident instead of just surviving them. The gap between companies that treat incident management strategically and those that wing it keeps widening. 2026 will bring its own incidents. Systems will break. Services will go down. The question is whether organizations will be ready. The post 5 Incident Management Lessons To Carry Into 2026 appeared first on The New Stack.