Crisis Preparedness, Readiness, and Early Warning
Crisis Preparedness, Readiness, and Early Warning
This domain tests whether you can build foresight and readiness before a crisis: scenario-based planning, indicators with thresholds and owners, monitoring, exercises, and the resources that make activation credible.
Core rules
- Build a scenario set from credible impact pathways, not just past events. For each, define plausible escalation, worst-case boundaries, and the decisions likely to be needed.
- Early warning requires leading indicators with explicit thresholds, data sources, review cadence, and a named owner. A signal without an owner and a decision rule is only interesting information.
- Use tiered indicators: watch for an anomaly, alert for a confirmed trend, and activation when a threshold is breached. Link each tier to a pre-agreed response.
- Playbooks should provide decision support for top scenarios: roles, first-hour actions, stakeholder map, draft statements, and dependencies. They are not rigid scripts.
- Readiness includes trained people, accessible facilities and tools, call trees, resource inventories, mutual-aid arrangements, and backups for critical systems.
- Exercises need objectives, realistic injects, an independent evaluator, and tracked corrective actions. Tabletop, functional, and simulation exercises test different things: judgement, systems, and coordination under load.
Worked example
A retailer sees a rise in social media complaints about a product and a two-day supplier delay. The early-warning register lists both as watch indicators with an owner in operations and a threshold of a 50% week-on-week increase plus a supply delay beyond three days. The owner validates the data, opens a watch brief, and notifies the crisis lead. When both thresholds trip, the lead moves to alert, convenes a small team, and prepares a holding statement. Reasoning: the indicators were defined, owned, and linked to a decision before the event.
Traps
Indicators with no owner or review cadence; relying on one data source; warning fatigue from over-sensitive thresholds; exercising the document rather than the team; and closing exercises without corrective actions.