Once you’ve made the decision to hold a crisis management exercise, how should the exercise team and participants begin planning for the exercise? There’s a lot to do in order to ensure that the goals of the exercise are achieved!

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser along with Consultant Bray Wheeler discuss their experiences in crafting and preparing exercise material – but also how to coach participants through preparing for the exercise that you are developing.

Related Posts & Podcast Episodes:

* Crisis Exercises: Why are they important?

* Managing Uncertainty Podcast – Episode #19: Exercises are Boring

* How to evaluate plan effectiveness after active shooter exercises

* Why social media and communications should be part of any crisis exercise

Episode Transcript

Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and CEO at Bryghtpath.

Bray Wheeler: This is Bray Wheeler, a consultant at Bryghtpath.

Bryan Strawser: We’ve decided that 90 days from now, we’re going to have a crisis exercise. We’ve scheduled it. We’ve sent out the invites. We’ve secured the room. Then it hits us. We have to prepare for this exercise. We just thought it was a good idea to have one. What are we going to do here? What do we do, Bray?

Bray Wheeler: Where to begin? Where to begin? Well, I think a couple of assumptions. We’ve identified the scenario. We’ve laid out our run of play, or our outline, for the exercise. We feel pretty confident in that. I think what we’re trying to drive at is-

Bryan Strawser: We know who’s participating and observing and evaluating and controlling, which might all be the same person.

Bray Wheeler: Right. All the finer points of the nature of the exercise and what we’re trying to accomplish has been laid out. But we have to get ready for it. I think there’s a couple of different pockets of things, activities, that have to be done. One is as players and one is as facilitators from that exercise. From just a pure participant player standpoint, there’s quite a bit that people can do that’s probably fairly obvious, but not everybody does it. We do surveys a lot with a lot of our companies, and it’s amazing to see that people, “Well, I brought the plan.” And that’s all they did.

Bryan Strawser: Bringing the plan is good. It’s good to have the plan with you.

Bray Wheeler: Right. It’s a good start, but they often don’t necessarily review that plan upfront. They’re not meeting as individual workstreams or things like that. There’s a lot that can be done. I think we’ve talked quite a bit about reviewing that plan is important, but it’s really looking at it from a, “I understand the general flow of how things go, that I could easily communicate that to somebody who doesn’t know.” Maybe that’s your participants, your members of your crisis group, whatever that is, should be able to walk up to a random employee in the company and be able to succinctly explain what the general process is for that and have that person understand what they’re talking about, because that means that participant gets it.

Bryan Strawser: Yeah. They understand what’s going on. They can speak to the context of the exercise.