How to make a crisis or emergency exercise as realistic as possible
There’s more to it than powerpoint templates, and a bit of video and running a simple table top exercise. Get your teams properly trained and feeling the pressure, with these ideas on how to make your crisis exercise as realistic as possible.
No-notice or not?
This is the big one. Every crisis lead loves the idea of springing a surprise exercise on their colleagues. In practice, no-notice exercises rarely happen. Mainly because of the logistics involved, but there is also a risk people won’t perform as well as they might in a scheduled exercise. This can lead to a loss of confidence, and a missed opportunity to rehearse and improve in the moment.
However, for experienced teams a no-notice exercise should be the gold standard.
Hybrid is best
Running an exercise with a mix of people on site and others dialled in is the hardest option, but the most realistic too. Unless, like one of our energy clients, your exercise includes an objective to bring together a team from different locations into one place.
A hybrid exercise helps test:
- Teams who work across multiple timezones
- Crisis leadership, ensuring the whole response team are heard and engaged, on- and offline
- Shift patterns and the personal resilience of staff who find themselves at the centre of the war room
Choose a scenario that hits a nerve
It’s crucial you are brave and choose a scenario that is uncomfortable. While a cyber attack sits high on most businesses’ risk register, there are likely to be awkward reputation, product or ethical risks on that list too.
Don’t shy away from these for fear of embarrassment. Engage a third party to design your scenario, facilitate the exercise and sleep easier knowing that one or more of the most challenging risks are being prepared for.
Turn up the volume: phone calls, town halls and media interviews
Ringing cellphones, protestors banging on the doors, lights, cameras, interview deadlines: these are crucial to bringing an exercise to life.
Make it fun by engaging colleagues to adopt the role of different stakeholders, or employ professional journalists or actors. No amount of sophisticated desktop discussion will replicate the sheer noise of a crisis response.
Now is the time to get your team used to that pressure.
All the right teams on board
It’s not always easy to get everyone’s time for an exercise, but as a minimum, for most scenarios, you should have representatives from the following teams:
- Legal
- HR
- Engineering/manufacturing/operations, as applicable to your business
- Internal communications
- External and investor communications
- Senior leadership (SLT)
- Security
- IT
If one or more of these teams are missed, you will need to role-play their input. There’s also a risk that the exercise stalls while participants defer to knowledge or sign-off that isn’t represented.
It’s often easier to role-play tiers of crisis management who may not be able to participate, for example Gold Command, than run an exercise with no legal expertise among the participants.
Information feeds and live engagement, all in one safe place
Platforms like Social Simulator help you surface realistic and highly engaging information in one place. The palpable buzz of seeing a news bulletin broadcast from outside your office, or a social media feed packed with complaints about your brand, represents next-level exercising.
Social Simulator enables participants to collaborate and record their actions. The consequences of those actions, positive or otherwise, are reflected live on the platform, enabling teams to modify or double-down on their actions.
Follow @socialsimulator and let us know what you think
