Lesson 4.46: Executive crisis simulation
A crisis exercise for executives isn't a technical drill. Information arrives in pieces, some of it wrong, and leaders must decide anyway: isolate systems, speak to the press, warn partners, call the insurer. The value lies in the decision log afterwards: what was decided, by whom, when, and why, and where nobody decided at all. In the lab you replay last week's executive simulation, read the injects and the decision log, find decisions with no owner or rationale, a missed inject, and decision-making concentrated in too few people, then write the lessons for the playbook.
19 min
You will learn to
- Read exercise injects as a timeline
- Audit a decision log for owner and rationale
- Find injects nobody decided on
- Compare actions with the playbook
- Write lessons that change the playbook
Key terms
- Inject
- A piece of new information given to players during an exercise.
- Decision log
- Time, decision, owner and rationale for each decision taken during a crisis.
- Holding statement
- A short public statement acknowledging an issue while facts are established.
- Planning assumption
- A stated working assumption (e.g. 'data was copied') used until proven wrong.
- Delegated authority
- Pre-agreed power for deputies to make defined decisions when leaders are unavailable.
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