Anonymised practitioner case study. The organisation, precise locations and dates are withheld to protect the client and its staff. Internal metrics are not published, and none has been invented in their place.
The client
A regional office with a written crisis management plan, an appointed crisis management team and no experience of using either.
The problem
The plan had been approved and filed. Nobody had tested whether the named people could be reached, whether they knew their roles, or whether decisions could actually be taken in the absence of the country director.
The method: a low-theatre tabletop exercise
- One realistic scenario built from actual regional incident patterns, delivered in timed injects over three hours.
- No scoring, no pass mark, no observers from headquarters. The stated purpose was to find gaps, not to assess individuals.
- Participants used only what they had on the day: their own phones, the filed plan, and whoever was actually present.
- A facilitator recorded every decision, every delay, and every moment the room went quiet.
- A deliberate mid-exercise inject removed the most senior person present, to test delegation rather than describe it.
- A one-hour debrief on the same day, followed by a written action list with owners and dates.
What the exercise found
The plan itself held up. Three things did not: the contact list contained numbers that were no longer in service; nobody could state who held decision authority when the country director was unreachable; and no one had been assigned to communicate with an affected staff member's family. Each was a documentation gap, not a competence gap, and each would have cost hours during a real event.
Transferable lessons
- Test the plan you have, not the plan you intend to write.
- Remove the senior person mid-exercise. Delegation is only real once it is used.
- Verify contact details as a routine task, monthly.
- Assign family liaison in advance. It is never absorbed comfortably on the day.
- No scoring. Exercises that feel like assessments produce performances, not findings.