Running a crisis simulation – how to rehearse and prepare effectively

A couple of years ago, I was in a room with a client, running a crisis simulation exercise to test their crisis plans.

There were two separate groups from the same company taking part in the exercise, representing two different parts of the business. They faced the same fictional crisis: some of their products were overheating and causing severe burns.

The two groups responded very differently. “We have to recall the product,” said one group leader. “We must warn our customers. Their safety is the most important thing.”

“We have to protect our revenue,” said the leader of the second group. “We will not recall the product and we will not tell people there is a problem until I see physical evidence of the burns.” 

It was fascinating. The company didn’t have any clear guidance about what their objective should be. Should they prioritise customers or revenue? They made vague reference to some company values, but no one could remember what they were or where to find them. So they reverted to their personal values to guide them through their decision making and their response. 

We were there to test their crisis plan execution but they’d fallen out before they got to the first page. It was a great lesson for the leadership team. 

Sometimes, running a crisis simulation turns up entirely unexpected issues. People under pressure get defensive. They lose empathy. Often, they want to blame someone for the crisis. They’re in fight or flight response (in this case, fight), and their rational brains disappear for a while. 

That’s why exercising is important – we learn a lesson from the military, and use exercise and rehearsal to override our instincts to run away from the problem, to put off making a decision, or to lash out at critics. 
It’s far better to discover these issues in a closed, private environment, than in the middle of a live crisis.

Picking and building your scenario

Some teams are brilliant at dealing with one issue but terrible at another. They might be well versed in managing a data breach, or a product recall, or even a physical event like a fire or flood – the things identified in their business continuity plans.

But the same team might struggle with something out of their ‘norms’, such as a social backlash (for example, how to deal with abuse or hate in response to a Pride campaign), or the aftermath of an activist campaign, or a deepfake of their CEO doing the rounds on social media.

There might be things they’ll never want to rehearse. Someone said to me, recently: “It takes a brave in-house communicator to tell their CEO they want to rehearse how to manage a potential sexual harassment lawsuit against him.” 

And there might be areas of disagreement that you should thrash out ahead of the crisis with a simulation. Would you pay a ransomware demand, for example? (I’ve been in simulations where the leadership team has been split down the middle on this.) You need a decent framework in place to help with decision making. I’m a big fan of decision trees – if ‘x’ happens, you decide ‘y’. 

Pick the toughest scenario you can imagine for your exercise, not one you feel comfortable with. Sometimes it helps to use a fictitious company or leader, so you can feel a bit of distance – you can be more creative about what the issues might be and how to handle them, if you don’t apply them to your own situation.

The best simulations, in my view, rehearse those things that make you feel deeply uncomfortable and really test your plans. They include an element of corporate fault, which will test if and how you take accountability (whether or not to say sorry is often the biggest debate in the room and rarely covered in crisis plans).

Start by writing down, in one paragraph, the overall scenario you want to test. Then build it out into something like a film treatment. Think about your storyline arc. How does the issue first emerge? How does it grow and develop? Where does it peak? What might complicate it? How would different groups respond and get involved? What moves the story on? 

A great storyline for a crisis simulation will include injects that move the story on (usually around 10 to 15 for a half-day simulation). 

And finally, what closes it down, to end the exercise? 

Who should be involved in a crisis simulation?

Who is involved really depends on your objective. Why are you running this exercise? 

If you’re testing your plans (the most common reason to run a simulation), pull together the full team who would be working on the crisis in real life, either virtually or in a single room. You need representation from across the business – legal, HR, tech, customer service, leadership, product, internal comms, risk, security – as well as the comms team.

There are other reasons to run a simulation. I’ve done some simulations purely for leadership teams (to test decision making); some for the security and tech teams (to challenge them to consider how a crisis impacts the rest of the business); and some just for the communications team (usually to train them, to test the communications element of the plan, or to give them confidence in responding).

Whatever your reason for running a simulation, include a range of voices and experience to challenge any received wisdom. Get insight from whoever is closest to the issue. If the issue is a customer issue, include someone in the room who’s closest to your customers.

Encourage disagreement, from all levels. It might feel messy, but it’s better to get everything out in the open during a rehearsal. This is your chance to try new things, to fail safely. 

Learning lessons from the simulation

The most important bit of the simulation is what you learn from it. I love hearing from clients that they’ve put in place the actions they identified during the exercise, and either prevented a crisis from happening as a result, or have had the confidence to deal with a crisis effectively. Often, those lessons will be identified by the participants themselves, either during the exercise or in the debrief discussion afterwards.

A good facilitator will do more listening than talking, guiding participants to find the answers themselves, and asking the right questions during the debrief. They’ll encourage the team to find resolutions and self-identify clear, time-bound actions, and recommendations for process change.

Appoint someone to hold the team accountable for making the changes they’ve identified and pick a date to bring the team back together to report on progress. 

Finally, commit to continual testing and learning to build resilience and lock in learning. Repeat the exercise regularly. It takes more than one session at the gym to build muscle.

Kate Hartley is the co-founder of Polpeo, a crisis simulation company. She is the author of Communicate in a Crisis and co-hosts the crisis podcast What Just Happened?. Kate’s blog was first published by the CIPR Crisis Communications Network.