CRIS study plan

Define crisis, critical incident, emergency, and disaster, and state in your own words the criteria that separate them.

Classify at least 10 crisis types (natural, technological, human-caused, cyber, reputational) and match each to a typical onset speed and blast radius.

Diagram the crisis lifecycle (pre-incident, acute, containment, recovery, learning) and write entry and exit criteria for each phase.

Explain how normalcy bias, information overload, and authority deference degrade early warning detection, using two workplace examples you construct yourself.

Construct a fictional 72-hour incident timeline and annotate the decision points where escalation could have been triggered earlier.

Map the crisis management team roles and write a one-line responsibility statement plus explicit decision-authority limit for each role.

Distinguish strategic, tactical, and operational decision layers and assign ownership of 12 decision types across them.

Apply a likelihood-by-impact matrix to rank 12 crisis scenarios for a single invented organization and justify the top three.

Draft the core sections of a crisis management plan: scope, activation triggers, escalation ladder, roles, communications, resource call-down, and maintenance.

Write activation and deactivation triggers that are observable and testable, eliminating vague qualifiers such as 'significant' or 'major'.

Design a tabletop exercise scenario with four timed injects and the expected decision and decision-owner at each inject.

Define a plan maintenance cycle specifying review cadence, document owner, version control, and training requirements.

Run the tabletop exercise yourself and record decisions, decision latency, and capability gaps against your plan outline.

Distinguish crisis management from business continuity management and explain how a business impact analysis feeds plan priorities.

Build a stakeholder map segmenting internal, customer, regulator, media, supply chain, and community audiences, each with a first-contact channel and owner.

Compose a 150-word holding statement for a scenario with unverified facts that acknowledges uncertainty without speculating.

Draft the first-60-minutes response playbook: verification, activation, notification, initial assessment, and first external message.

Write a crisis communications protocol covering spokesperson authority, approval chain, message cadence, and channel priority order.

Compose three audience-specific messages (employees, customers, regulator) for one scenario while keeping all facts consistent.

Identify five recurring communication failure modes and write a concrete countermeasure for each.

Design an information-flow model for the crisis team: who reports what, to whom, how often, and on which channel.

Build a decision log template and back-fill it with five decisions reconstructed from your week-four tabletop.

State the transition criteria from response to recovery and list the artifacts that must transfer between the two phases.

Identify the recovery workstreams (people, operations, finance, legal, reputation, technology) and assign a lead and first deliverable to each.

Conduct a business impact analysis for a fictional organization, ranking eight processes by maximum tolerable downtime, RTO, and RPO.

Distinguish business continuity planning, disaster recovery, and organizational resilience, and assign each recovery activity to the correct discipline.

Select a continuity strategy set (redundancy, alternate site, manual workaround, third-party dependency) and justify the choice for each critical process.

Design a post-incident review process covering evidence collection, timeline reconstruction, root cause, and corrective actions with owners and due dates.

Draft a 12-month resilience improvement roadmap from the gaps logged in weeks four through seven, with owners and success measures.

Define leading indicators for your top five scenarios and set a monitoring threshold and review interval for each.

Complete a timed full-length practice exam and classify every miss by domain and by error type (knowledge gap, misread, guessing).

Re-drill the three weakest objectives from the whole plan until each can be explained aloud without notes.