Exercises designed correctly build capability, ensuring the plan and processes are fit for purpose. Building crisis management capabilities through continual improvement is also supported by an organisation’s training, exercise activities, and learning the lessons identified from crises.
The purpose of exercising is to:
- rehearse crisis management processes and activities
- evaluate capabilities and their supporting components
- encourage and facilitate everyone to question their own and the organisation’s readiness and fitness for crisis management
- build confidence in their operation
- develop the ability to work as a team under adverse and stressful conditions
The key to crisis management is to identify improvements and corrections that need to be made, which are then proven in subsequent evaluations; it’s only then possible to call them lessons learned, providing mitigation toward avoiding the same impact.
We will guide your lesson management team, ensuring they are adopting best practices or will facilitate an exercise/lesson management activity for your organisation. An activity could be a desktop scenario, a functional exercise designed to focus on critical components of the organisation’s preparation, response, and recovery, or a field exercise that simulates a recognised potential threat to the organisation. No two organisations are the same therefore requiring a custom-designed exercise/lesson management plan – contact us and make an appointment to discuss your organisation’s needs.
The Benefits of Scenario-Based Exercising
Engaging our consultants to design a realistic scenario-based exercise appropriate to your organisation’s perceived threats will test existing capabilities to respond to an interruption and provide assurance that the organisation’s crisis management team (CMT) is practised. Exercises are designed to
- Test the CMT’s ability to activate a response, have the confidence to execute their roles
- Authenticate processes and resources needed to mitigate the threat.
- Identify deficiencies and insights gained with recommendations drafted for improvement.
Contact us and make an appointment to discuss your organisation’s needs.
The Benefits of Lessons Management
Does practice make perfect? Even if an organisation perceives preparations to be perfect, it is naive to expect ‘things’ to be methodical, rational, and appropriate during the management of a crisis. Without a continued improvement plan the best we can hope for probably is controlled chaos. To ‘help forge confidence in organisations in dealing with a crisis, ‘ a plan must be generated, the plan must be known, and it is being revised continuously. Each plan must be practised and critiqued to identify potential deficiencies.
The objective of building crisis management capabilities through continual improvement can also be supported by the organisation’s training and exercising activities and learning the lessons identified from crises.
ISO 22361 Security and resilience – crisis management guidelines for strategic capability, section 5.3.7 states;
‘Learning the lessons from a crisis or planned exercise is an essential element of crisis management
An organisation should
- undertake a review of the crisis, including an evaluation of the response, the plans and procedures, and the tools and facilities, to identify areas for improvement
- identify lessons to be learned and make recommendations for change, including the responsibilities and timelines to drive changes forward and ensure they are completed
- learn from the crisis and exercise and make improvements to become better prepared and build resilience, including making changes in the organisation, its people, plans and procedures
- conduct debriefs and follow-up communication with individuals, teams and interested parties involved in the crisis to identify learning opportunities
- reflect and act on lessons so that latent problems and vulnerabilities do not persist and predispose the organisation to future crises’
contact us and make an appointment to discuss your organisation’s needs.
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