{"id":1009,"date":"2026-10-01T10:38:56","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T08:38:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/martinriecken.de\/en\/?p=1009"},"modified":"2026-10-02T10:48:48","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T08:48:48","slug":"train-the-muscle-not-the-manual","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/martinriecken.de\/en\/train-the-muscle-not-the-manual\/","title":{"rendered":"Train the muscle. Not the manual."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Would you ever dare to walk on stage at sold-out Carnegie Hall and play a Beethoven sonata without having practised hard? Probably not. It takes hundreds of hours of focused practice to reach mastery in any demanding craft. Yet when it comes to managing risk and protecting reputation, corporations often trust their \u201cnormal\u201d organisational skills, their gut feeling or their quiet belief that \u201csomeone will know what to do\u201d to carry them through a crisis.<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They ignore the fact that steering through a high-stakes situation takes a different, non-BAU approach altogether. This is a dangerous blind spot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Governance \u2013 the mandates, frameworks and approval chains that keep an organisation accountable \u2013 is slow, deliberate and steering, by design. A crisis is the opposite: fast, ambiguous and dynamic, demanding agile decisions in real time. How do you bring the two under one roof? Certainly not in the heat of the moment. The only way to reconcile governance and agile crisis management is to adopt governance before a crisis hits, so that when people are forced to improvise, they improvise within the boundaries it sets. And there is only one way to get there \u2013 train!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason is simple. Despite all the crisis-management governance and planning, the protocols, checklists and approval chains, in the end it takes real people who are living and breathing crisis \u2013 who have internalised what needs to be done, how and when, who have grown an instinct for the pitfalls, and who can think, manage, decide and act under pressure \u2013 in an unprecedented, business-critical situation. Aka crisis. You cannot acquire these capabilities by reading books or attending seminars. The people who own key roles in a crisis have to build the muscle themselves. And they have to build it the right way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“You can train hard and still underperform. Crisis training is not a knowledge test. It’s about rehearsing behaviour.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In my opinion, three aspects make training “right”:<\/p>\n\n\n\n