The Exercise You Already Know Is Wrong
A manufacturing business has an annual crisis exercise booked in three weeks: venue held, external facilitator contracted, £18k budget approved, board observers invited. Two weeks ago two things surfaced. First, a walk-through showed that only about 60 per cent of the staff assumed available in the 18-month-old BIA could actually reach the site during a transport disruption - the BIA was produced by a consultant and never validated. Second, an IT recovery test revealed that the disaster recovery comms room shares a fibre entry route with the primary data centre, which the plan assumes is independent. The executive sponsor who commissioned the exercise has just been replaced. The new sponsor asks whether to postpone until the plan is corrected.
1. Postpone, proceed as planned, or something else? Justify the decision.
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Neither cancel nor run it as designed - keep the date, change the scope. Postponing until the plan is 'corrected' is the classic trap: plans are never corrected, and a postponed exercise rarely returns with the same sponsorship and budget.
But running the original script is worse than cancelling. It would rehearse assumptions the organisation already knows are false, producing false assurance and - more damaging - teaching participants that exercises are theatre. Once a known-wrong assumption has been discovered, an exercise that ignores it destroys the credibility of the whole programme.
So redesign: test the response system rather than the document. Use the three weeks to convert the two defects into injected problems - 'the alternate site shares a fibre route' and 'only 60 per cent of staff arrive' become the scenario's conditions, not its surprises. The facilitator, venue and observers still earn their cost, and the organisation learns what it actually does when its continuity assumptions fail, which is precisely the question that matters.
2. What objectives would you set for the exercise, and how would you make them assessable?
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Three to five objectives, each observable, with the evidence and the pass criterion agreed before the day. Otherwise the evaluation becomes a discussion about how it felt.
Candidate objectives:
- The continuity decision is made, recorded, and communicated within 60 minutes of invocation, with only 60 per cent of assumed staff available. Evidence: decision log timestamps. Pass: decision logged with rationale and an accountable name.
- The team identifies and adapts to the shared fibre route without prompting. Evidence: inject response within 15 minutes.
- The new executive sponsor states their decision rights and is not bypassed. Evidence: observer checklist.
- Staff call-out and cascade reaches 90 per cent of the contact list within 45 minutes.
- External and internal communications are issued consistent with the crisis comms plan.
Add a deliberate 'no-fault' rule: participants must be able to fail safely, or they will perform for the observers and you will learn nothing.
3. How do you handle the stale BIA and the change of executive sponsor?
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Treat them as two separate problems with two different owners.
The BIA: commission a validation refresh with a named owner, a date, and a method that uses real availability data - badge records, journey times, shift patterns - not a repeat survey. In the interim, maintain an assumptions register listing what you know is unproven, so decisions taken during a real event carry a stated confidence level. Do not make the refresh a precondition for exercising; that inverts the dependency.
The new sponsor: a 30-minute briefing on decision rights, the top five continuity risks, and the honest state of the plan - including the two defects. Then use the exercise as their onboarding: a sponsor who watches their organisation struggle with a shared fibre route and a two-thirds turnout learns more in one afternoon than in three briefing packs, and is far more likely to fund the fix afterwards.