I’ve been asked to run at least five crisis and continuity exercises in the last month. Maybe it’s a springtime thing?
Whatever the seasonal driver, the intent is the main thing. And it is the main thing, because the reason for running your exercise should define what that exercise looks like.
There’s obviously a range of exercise types, from drills and discussion exercises through to tabletop and full-blown practical simulations. And while there’s plenty of guidance around exercise design, the reality is that most exercises need to be customised to the needs of the participants and the limitations of the organisation.
Exercises are expensive and time-consuming. They are also extremely valuable.
But again: what is your intent? What do you actually need to get out of the exercise?
I frequently find that organisations want to really test the limits of their responders through surprise, urgent, drill-type exercises. But often that desire comes when the participants haven’t yet trained with the plan, let alone exercised it.
I can appreciate the drive to test the team under fire. But an exercise programme needs to follow a crawl–walk–run cadence. If you start sprinting straight away, you’re going to tear something.
If you surprise people, go too hard too soon, or overwhelm participants before they’ve even figured out how to exercise (let alone understood the plan or procedures) you risk shaking their confidence. They’ll be rattled, rather than better prepared for the day when you really need them.
You need to exercise your people, not test them.
People shouldn’t be set up to fail. Their experience should help them build confidence and familiarity with the documentation and procedures. It should exercise the neural pathways involved in making decisions under pressure and with limited information. And it should let them experience, in a physically and emotionally safe environment, the kinds of situations they might encounter in a real incident.
The sporting and performance clichés are accurate here: the more you rehearse, the better prepared you should be for the main event, and the more confident you should feel.
That’s not to say pressure tests or cold starts aren’t useful. They are. But they need to be used at the right stage of training and exercising. Build up to them.
Plans and procedures, on the other hand, should absolutely be tested.
They might be great. They might be rubbish. Let’s find out.
And let the participants be the arbiters of how well the documents actually work. After all, they’re the ones who have to use them. Is the content accurate? Are there gaps in roles and responsibilities? Are procedures too light? Are the documents too dense? Are they unreadable under time pressure?
Those things should be determined through the users’ experience of actually trying to use them.
There is another aspect to that assessment, though: how good was the training and education beforehand?
You could have the best plan ever written, but it still won’t work if no time has been spent helping people understand it. That means everything from understanding the content, to knowing how and when to use the document and, oh yeah, where to find it.
So figure out what you really need from your exercise.
Where are you at with the training and embedding cycle? Do they need to be walked through the document, using a scenario to give it context? Or are they ready to drill a response after a siren wakes them at 03:00?
Pitch it right and build it slowly. Let the team learn from the experience and give you feedback on the documents.
Exercise your people. Test your plans.
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