A crisis management exercise should do more than confirm that a plan exists or allow participants to talk through a scenario.
Its purpose is to test whether the organization can actually manage a crisis: establish leadership, understand an uncertain situation, set priorities, make decisions, coordinate activities, communicate effectively, and adapt as circumstances change.
A useful exercise therefore tests capability and behavior, not simply familiarity with procedures.
1. Define What the Exercise Should Test
Start with clear exercise objectives.
Avoid broad objectives such as “test the crisis plan.” They make meaningful evaluation difficult.
Instead, identify specific capabilities or behaviors that the exercise should examine. For
- recognizing and escalating a potential crisis;
- activating the Crisis Management Team (CMT);
- establishing strategic objectives and priorities;
- developing situational awareness from incomplete information;
- making significant decisions under uncertainty;
- coordinating business and operational teams;
- managing stakeholder communication; or
- transitioning toward recovery.
A single exercise does not need to test everything.
A focused exercise with clear objectives can provide more useful evidence than a complex exercise attempting to cover the entire crisis-management framework.
2. Choose an Appropriate Exercise Format
Different exercise formats serve different purposes.Different exercise formats serve different purposes.
A discussion-based tabletop exercise may be appropriate for exploring roles, authority, escalation, strategic decisions, and coordination.
More dynamic simulations can introduce greater time pressure, information flow, stakeholder interaction, and operational complexity.
The important point is that exercise format alone does not determine exercise quality or evidence strength.
A sophisticated simulation with weak objectives and little meaningful decision-making may demonstrate less than a well-designed tabletop that genuinely challenges leadership.
Choose the format according to what needs to be tested.
3. Build a Credible Scenario
The scenario provides the context for the exercise, but it should not become the exercise itself.
A useful scenario should be credible enough for participants to engage seriously while creating conditions that challenge the capabilities being tested.
It should create uncertainty, consequences, competing demands, and decisions.
The scenario should also evolve.
New information, changing impacts, stakeholder reactions, operational constraints, or unexpected developments can be introduced through exercise injects.
However, complexity should have a purpose. Injects should create decisions or test specific capabilities rather than simply make the scenario more dramatic.
4. Test Decisions, Not Scenario Knowledge
Participants should not succeed because they correctly guess what the exercise designers expect to happen next.
A crisis rarely develops according to a predetermined script.
Instead, the exercise should place participants in situations where they need to:
- distinguish facts from assumptions;
- identify information gaps;
- establish priorities;
- evaluate options and consequences;
- make decisions despite uncertainty;
- assign actions and ownership; and
- reconsider decisions when important information changes.
Facilitators should avoid steering participants toward a preferred answer unless required to keep the exercise functioning.
The objective is to observe how the organization manages the problem.
5. Exercise the Interfaces
Crisis management does not operate in isolation.
Exercises should examine how information and decisions move between the CMT, business management, operational response teams, communications, and relevant specialist functions.
For example:
Does operational information reach crisis leadership at the right level?
Can business representatives explain impacts, priorities, and constraints without pulling business managers away from managing the business?
Do CMT priorities and decisions reach the people responsible for implementation?
Do communication activities remain aligned with leadership decisions?
Many weaknesses become visible at these interfaces rather than within individual teams.
6. Run the Exercise Without Taking It Over
Exercise facilitators control the exercise environment, not the participants’ decisions.
At the beginning, participants should understand the objectives, scope, assumptions, exercise rules, and any artificial constraints.
During the exercise, facilitators should introduce information, maintain appropriate pace, clarify exercise mechanics where necessary, and observe performance.
They should resist the temptation to rescue the team whenever participants struggle.
Confusion, disagreement, delayed decisions, or information problems may be exactly what the exercise needs to reveal.
7. Observe and Evaluate Performance
Evaluation should be tied directly to the exercise objectives.
Observers should look for evidence of what participants actually did, rather than simply whether they participated.
Useful questions include:
- Was authority clear?
- Were priorities established?
- Was important information identified and validated?
- Were assumptions recognized?
- Were significant decisions actually made?
- Were actions assigned and followed?
- Did information move effectively between strategic and operational levels?
- Were communications coordinated?
- Did the team adapt as conditions changed?
Observations should distinguish demonstrated strengths from gaps, assumptions, and areas that were not actually tested.
8. Turn Lessons into Improvement
An exercise has limited value if the process ends with an after-action report.
The organization should identify specific improvements, assign owners, establish deadlines, and track actions through completion.
Where important weaknesses are identified, the organization should consider whether further exercise or validation is required after corrective actions have been implemented.
The objective is not merely to document lessons.
It is to change capability.
When Is an Exercise Successful?
Exercise success should not be measured by whether participants handled everything perfectly.
An exercise that reveals important weaknesses may be extremely valuable.
Success means that the organization obtained credible information about its crisis-management capability and used that information to improve.
A good exercise does not prove that the organization will never fail. It provides evidence about what the organization can do, where uncertainty remains, and what needs to improve.
For professionals seeking a structured learning path, the online crisis management course Mastering Crisis Management with ISO 22361 explores crisis exercises, leadership, decision-making, assessment, communication, and continual improvement in greater depth.
The Professional Crisis Management Toolkit provides editable resources that can support exercise planning, scenario development, facilitation, evaluation, action tracking, and crisis-management improvement.
Independent Resource Notice: Crisis Readiness Pro resources are independently developed by Shalom David and aligned with ISO 22361 principles where applicable. They are not ISO publications and are not affiliated with, endorsed by, approved by, or certified by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).