Rehearsing the Crisis: Why Exercising Is the Defining Discipline of Resilient Organisations

The Plan Is Not the Capability

Most organisations have plans. Crisis management plans, incident response plans, business continuity plans, communications plans, supplier failure plans. Many of these documents are well structured, professionally produced and signed off at appropriate levels. Very few of them survive contact with a real event without significant adjustment.

The gap between the plan and the actual capability to respond is the single most consistent finding from post incident reviews. The plan assumes clarity about who is in charge. The reality reveals competing claims to authority. The plan assumes that key individuals are available. The reality reveals that two of them are on holiday and a third is on a flight. The plan assumes that decisions can be made in a structured sequence. The reality reveals a torrent of incoming information, conflicting external pressure and the need to make several significant decisions in parallel within the first hour.

None of this is a criticism of the people who write plans. It is simply a recognition that documents alone do not produce capability. Capability is produced by rehearsal.

What Exercising Actually Does

A well designed exercise does several things at once. It exposes the assumptions buried inside existing plans. It builds familiarity between the people who will need to work together under pressure. It surfaces the points where roles, responsibilities and decision rights are unclear. It tests whether the information flows that the plan depends on actually function. And it creates a shared experience that becomes the reference point for future incidents.

The value of that shared experience is often underestimated. When a real event occurs, the executive team does not have time to read documents or to debate process. They need to fall back on instinct shaped by prior rehearsal. Organisations that exercise regularly develop a kind of collective muscle memory that allows them to move faster, communicate more clearly and make better decisions under pressure.

The Spectrum of Exercises

Exercising is not a single activity. It is a spectrum that ranges from short discussion based sessions to fully simulated multi day events involving external participants.

Discussion based exercises, often called tabletops, are the workhorse of any serious exercising programme. They are relatively low cost, can be designed and delivered within weeks, and are particularly effective at testing decision making, communication and the clarity of roles. A well facilitated tabletop can deliver more practical insight in three hours than months of plan revision.

Functional exercises step up the realism by testing specific capabilities under more pressured conditions, often using simulated systems, injects delivered in real time and observers embedded within response teams. These are particularly valuable for testing cyber response, technology recovery and communications capability.

Full scale exercises bring all of this together, often involving external partners such as suppliers, regulators or emergency services. They are resource intensive and require significant planning, but they are the gold standard for organisations that need to demonstrate genuine readiness for high consequence events.

A mature exercising programme uses all three, in proportion to risk and regulatory expectation, and builds a clear annual calendar that the executive team is held accountable for delivering.

Designing Exercises That Actually Work

The difference between an exercise that produces real insight and one that becomes a performative exercise in box ticking lies in the design.

Good exercises are built around scenarios that are plausible, uncomfortable and specific to the organisation. Generic scenarios tend to produce generic responses. Scenarios that draw on the organisation actual dependencies, its real geographies, its known supplier concentrations and its current strategic priorities produce far sharper learning.

Good exercises have clear objectives that are agreed in advance and revisited honestly afterwards. The objective is not to pass the exercise. The objective is to learn. An exercise in which everything goes smoothly has almost certainly been designed too gently.

Good exercises are facilitated by people who understand both the technical content and the dynamics of executive teams under pressure. Facilitation is a craft. A skilled facilitator can extract significantly more value from the same scenario than an inexperienced one.

Good exercises produce a small number of clear, prioritised actions with named owners and realistic timeframes. A long list of vague observations is the surest sign that the exercise has not been properly closed out.

For organisations that want to build a sustained exercising programme, our testing and exercises team designs and facilitates exercises end to end, tailored to your industry and risk profile.

Embedding Exercising in the Wider Resilience Programme

Exercising should not sit as a standalone activity. It should be the connective tissue that links plans, training, governance and assurance. The findings from exercises should feed directly into plan revisions, training priorities, board reporting and supplier assurance. Done well, the exercising programme becomes the engine that keeps the entire resilience programme honest.

This is one of the threads that runs through the CCMP® Certified Crisis Management Professional certification and the CORM® Certified Operational Resilience Manager certification. Building leaders who can design, deliver and learn from exercises is one of the most leveraged investments an organisation can make in its long term resilience.

A Final Word

The organisations that respond well to crises are not the ones with the thickest plans. They are the ones that have rehearsed honestly, learnt openly and built the collective muscle memory that allows them to act with speed and clarity when it matters most. Exercising is not an optional extra. It is the discipline that turns a plan into a capability.