A crisis manual is quick to write. Roles defined, escalation paths mapped, contact lists maintained. On paper, almost every crisis management set-up looks solid. The problem: paper doesn’t respond well under pressure. People do. That’s why there’s no way around crisis exercises. But the value of an exercise lies in the detail. So it’s worth taking a closer look at what exercises actually deliver, what formats exist, and what online simulations are good for.
Why practise at all?
Crisis exercises are a scientifically well-supported tool for building knowledge, role clarity, coordination, and identifying organisational weak points.
A simulation shows how an organisation really “ticks” – how it thinks, acts, decides and communicates. Not how it looks on paper in the emergency plan. That’s where the real value lies. Only in the exercise does it become clear whether legal and communications actually share the same understanding of risk. Whether escalation thresholds are as clear as everyone assumed. Whether the same patterns that run business as usual kick in, or whether the crisis actually gets managed as a crisis. And, quite simply: whether the crisis team can even assemble, fully and functioning, within fifteen minutes.
What exercises actually deliver:
- Confidence over freeze. Teams who have run through the process before don’t have to invent it in the moment.
- Visible gaps. Processes, responsibilities, systems: plenty of things that sound fine in theory fall apart in practice.
- Collaboration that holds up. Crises never touch just one department. Exercises test the interfaces between communications, IT, legal, sales and management, before it counts.
- Psychological safety. Crisis trainers report that people under pressure often freeze, or stop acting altogether for fear of getting it wrong. Anyone who has been through that once in a safe environment makes calmer decisions next time.
- Routine. Like learning an instrument: repetition beats talent. By the third run-through, the first steps come without anyone having to think about them.
How much that matters is clear from a routine in aviation. Before every flight, cockpit and cabin crew run through what to do in an emergency: who flies, who calls it in, when a take-off is aborted, who leads the evacuation, what to do in case of fire. The entire aviation system is built on safety. And exercises are a critical part of that.
Anyone who treats exercises as a box-ticking exercise underestimates how much they actually change. Whether, and to what extent, these effects last and translate directly into performance in a real crisis depends on how well the exercises are embedded in a wider concept – more on that at the end of this piece.
From tabletop to full-scale: the range of formats
Internationally, a whole vocabulary has developed around crisis exercises. In Germany the terminology differs slightly, but it usually points to much the same thing.
Tabletop exercise. The lowest-threshold format. Leaders sit around a table, a scenario is presented, usually in stages. It’s discussion, not action, no time pressure, no role-players. Good for testing new plans or introducing a team to the topic in the first place. Realistic injects and artefacts keep participants on their toes.
Functional exercise. More pace, more realism. Now it’s not just discussion but real action: reporting lines, escalation, coordination between the crisis team and business units. External parties usually aren’t involved yet, but it gets noticeably tighter for participants.
Full-scale exercise. The most demanding format, and the one that comes closest to a real crisis. External partners are involved, role-players stand in for those affected or the press, sometimes there are even real blue lights on scene. Resource-intensive, but hard to replace when the interplay with authorities or emergency services needs to be tested.
Special formats. Beyond these, there are variants with their own purpose. Alert exercises test only whether, and how fast, the right people can actually be reached – simple, but often the weak spot. Corporate war games work with a “red team” that actively attacks or challenges the organisation. Not welcome in every corporate culture, but particularly revealing for communications strategy.
Not every format fits every organisation. What matters more is choosing the format that matches your organisation’s readiness level, and then building up from there, consistently.
Online simulations: what they deliver, and where they hit their limits
Now that hybrid working is the norm, the next real crisis is also likely to start online: a phone call, a message, a Teams meeting at six in the morning. It makes sense to practise that way too. The British consultancy Inoni recently drew a sober conclusion on this, one that matches our own experience.
Advantages:
- Participants in different locations can be brought together without any travel.
- Organisation and cost stay manageable compared with an in-person exercise complete with venue and role-players.
- It tests exactly the set-up in which many crises actually begin: distributed teams, digital channels, no chance to quickly align in the corridor.
Disadvantages:
- Reading the room, keeping people engaged, stopping someone hiding behind mute: all of that is noticeably harder online.
- Body language is almost entirely absent. Especially in the debrief, when honest feedback matters, that’s a real loss.
- The line between exercise and reality blurs more easily. If participants step out of the exercise, or talk to outsiders who aren’t briefed, a simulation can quickly turn into genuine confusion.
- The informal exchange before and after the exercise is missing, and with it a degree of trust that tends to build almost on its own in person.
- Not every piece of software for online simulations delivers a genuinely realistic setting. Then the whole thing can end up feeling nothing like the real thing.
The answer is rarely to avoid online entirely, or to replace real exercises with it altogether. What matters is that the chosen format fits the purpose.
The bottom line: exercises help. But they don’t solve everything
Crisis exercises aren’t a box to tick, they’re the only way to actually test crisis management before it counts. Whether tabletop, functional or full-scale, whether online or in the conference room: what matters isn’t the most elaborate format, it’s the right one, and that exercising happens at all. Regularly, honestly evaluated, and with a willingness to actually see your own weaknesses.
Anyone who takes crisis management seriously should keep one thing in mind: the research points fairly clearly to the fact that the impact of tabletop exercises and crisis-team drills depends less on spectacular scenarios than on the learning cycle:
Objectives → Exercise → Reflection/Debrief → Improvement Actions → Implementation → Re-exercise.
… which then also gets reflected in the crisis plans. That’s exactly the point where “an interesting crisis simulation” parts ways with genuine organisational crisis preparedness.