Crisis Management Training: Testing the Plan and the People

A crisis plan is only as good as the people running it

Cyber attacks, natural disasters, terrorism, fraud and reputational events can hit any organisation with little or no warning. PwC’s Global Crisis and Resilience Survey found that nine in ten organisations had experienced multiple major disruptions.

Most organisations have a crisis plan. Far fewer have tested their people’s ability to run it under pressure, with incomplete information and in real time. That is usually where a response succeeds or fails, and it is what crisis management training is designed to address.

Why crisis plans fail

A crisis plan sets out roles, procedures and contacts. It cannot predict exactly how a crisis will unfold, and it cannot make decisions. When a real crisis hits, the team running the plan faces incomplete and sometimes contradictory information, pressure from the media, regulators, staff and customers, and decisions that need to be made in minutes rather than days. Stress affects judgement and communication at exactly the moment both matter most.

Teams that have practised together handle this far better than those meeting their plan for the first time.

The mistakes that repeat

The same failures appear in crisis after crisis. Some organisations have no plan at all, or no clear way to activate the one they have. Others lose time to confusion over roles, authority and who makes which decision.

Some of the most damaging mistakes are about communication. Untruths and attempts to cover up almost always come out. Refusing to engage with the media leaves others to tell the story. Allowing lawyers to dictate the whole strategy can protect the legal position while destroying trust. Ignoring customers, investors and other stakeholders, and failing to record actions and decisions, both cause lasting problems long after the crisis has passed.

The golden hour

The first 60 minutes of a crisis, often called the golden hour, shape everything that follows. Decisions made in that hour determine how information is controlled, how people are kept safe and how the organisation is seen to be in charge. Good crisis management training spends time on exactly this period: how to activate the team, establish the facts, set priorities and make the first public statement.

What our crisis management training covers

Our Crisis Management Preparedness & Response programme begins with how crises develop and escalate, how to spot the early warning signs and how people behave under stress. It then covers structured frameworks for response, decision making and escalation, and the roles, authority and accountability within a crisis team.

Delegates work with incident command and decision models, including the National Decision Model and OODA, and learn how to communicate with regulators, media, staff, customers and investors, and how to work alongside law enforcement and other agencies. The programme closes with recovery, business continuity and how to improve your plan.

Learning through simulation

The programme then moves into a live simulation. The scenario changes as the team responds, with media injects and real-time decisions, and each phase ends with a structured debrief so the team can reflect and adopt the lessons before the next phase begins. Afterwards, you receive a report on team performance, key findings and recommendations for strengthening your plan and your people.

Every simulation is built around the threats your organisation actually faces. That might be a cyber attack or data breach a terrorist attack, fraud or misconduct by senior staff, an incident affecting staff overseas, a product failure, or a reputational crisis played out on social media.

Who we have trained

We have delivered crisis management training to the Asia Pacific Presidents and Vice Presidents of Marriott International, to Langham Hospitality Group and to Manulife. We also co-designed the Cyber Wargaming and Crisis Management programme delivered with Deloitte to clients in Hong Kong, Macau and mainland China.

“The training was very thought-provoking. The team were great at flexing to work in response to our team as they reacted real-time throughout the crisis.” – Anthony Buchanan, CIO, Manulife

Many organisations combine this programme with our Critical Decision Making Under Pressure course, which explains how stress and bias affect judgement and teaches a structured decision model.

Ready before it happens

A crisis is the wrong time to find out that your plan does not work or that your team has never practised it. Crisis management training gives leadership teams the experience of managing a crisis in a safe environment, so they are ready when a real one arrives.

To discuss a crisis simulation for your leadership team, speak to our training team.