What makes an impactful stress-test for a corporate affairs team?

Rolls-Royce PLC approached us to test the global corporate affairs team, as part of a wider exercise for the global crisis management structure and processes. The scenario was a serious product issue.

We brought Rolls Royce’s scenario to life with the Social Simulator platform.

There were three key areas for the teams to respond to: the failure of their product, the involvement of a high-profile passenger, and the initial spread of misinformation about the cause of the incident.

We raised the bar with this simulation by:

• Testing response on both the company’s internal intranet and external social media accounts.
• Hosting an on-site ‘newsroom’ and interview team to conduct media training with company executives, in real time.
• Early spread of highly damaging misinformation.

"We engaged with The Social Simulator to support us with the delivery of a Group-wide crisis management exercise.

The team worked with us to build an interactive social media and media environment that our exercise participants could observe and interact with in real-time during the exercise.

All the media feeds were extremely realistic and they helped to add the pace and complexity that we would expect from the modern news environment.

The exercise helped us to clarify our future training needs, as well as helping to highlight a number of required updates to our crisis response protocols.

The training that products like The Social Simulator allow – with a real-time and adaptive pseudo media element – help to take continuity training to the next level and ensure that it remains in step with the wider technological and social developments impacting the field.

The Social Simulator team were a pleasure to work with; they really helped to bring our exercise to life.”

Andy Marshall, Business Continuity and Crisis Management Lead, Rolls-Royce PLC