A modern crisis simulation is immediately engaging and includes a wide range of channels in a safe environment.
Look for these elements when deciding on a platform for your next drill, exercise or crisis simulation:
You hope participants follow the established processes, but if they don’t, then you need the ability to intervene. A flexible simulation platform will allow you to quickly adapt a scenario to participants’ actions.
Scenarios, channels, characters and templates must be customisable to your markets and the risks you’re rehearsing. Off-the-shelf scenarios are hard for participants to engage with and won’t deliver the necessary lessons learned.
Get the most bang for your buck. Ensure that your simulation can host large numbers of participants (if required), or that simulations can be repeated, extended or recycled for other teams. Standardised simulation booking tools and exercise design processes help make this easy.
Engagement is key. By making sure that content is customised to your markets and risks, you can use eyewitness footage, images, phone calls and live media interviews to bring the whole experience to life.
It’s great to have all participants in one place. But a crisis doesn’t observe timezones or geography. So make sure your simulation platform works effectively for remote and in-person participants.
Bespoke military or education platforms have their place. But you’ll benefit more from a simulation platform built on experience and feedback from cross-sector training and development. Look for evidence of a simulation platform used both in military and academic exercises, but also financial services, manufacturing, retail and aviation.
Industry-standard platforms offer exercises in multiple languages, including, for example, Arabic and Mandarin.
AI helps to deliver many of the criteria above, provided there is a rigorous process for quality control by humans. Content creation, translation and scenario design can all be scaled effectively using AI.
But sophisticated, experienced teams are still able to quickly identify AI-generated engagement and the absence of human role play. So, make sure your simulation platform is backed up by experienced content creators, writers, journalists and social media experts.
Simulation platforms must be secure, to avoid triggering a real crisis or exposing sensitive information.
Any simulation platform and its infrastructure should conform to the equivalent of the UK’s Cyber Essentials Plus certification or ISO27001.
The best simulation platforms will enable you to benchmark a team’s performance and chart an organisation’s maturity across multiple exercises.
Make sure that a simulation platform allows you to download key data from each exercise, survey participants, score activities and benchmark against other teams.
There are lots of great Software as a Service options out there (see below). However, you need to be sure that you have the necessary resources to set up, maintain and run SaaS exercises. You’ll need to create a lot of the content yourself, or pay a premium to do so.
Off-the-shelf SaaS means compromising on realism and customisation. A simulation shouldn’t feel like a piece of theatre or a publishing schedule. Beware of too much automation.
Crisis simulations should be far deeper and broader than traditional media training and social. Make sure you can simulate:
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