Stress-testing resilience under pressure¶
It is easy to assume your continuity plans will work because they look good on paper. Reality has a nasty habit of tearing those plans apart at the seams.
This workshop is about trying to break things on purpose — in a safe environment. By stress-testing your organisation against realistic scenarios, you discover whether your defences, processes, and people can stand up under actual pressure. Better to learn in a room with coffee than in the middle of a crisis.
Core principles¶
Safe-to-fail environment: Experiments are designed to surface gaps, not shame individuals.
Realism over theatre: We use scenarios drawn from your actual context, not generic “hurricane hits HQ” clichés.
Adaptive, not scripted: Facilitators adjust the pressure based on your team’s responses.
Actionable outcomes: The point is not just to watch things break, but to identify how to strengthen them.
How it works: A practical structure¶
This workshop can run as a focused tabletop (2–3 hours) or as a full-day live simulation.
Setup: Choose your stress test
Ransomware outbreak during payroll.
Key supplier failure mid-project.
Sudden regulatory audit.
Senior leadership unavailable at a critical decision point.
Immersion: Run the scenario
Teams work through the event as it unfolds.
Facilitators inject new complications to simulate cascading failures.
Observers note bottlenecks, confusion points, and ad-hoc problem solving.
Debrief: Harvest the insights
What worked surprisingly well?
Where did we stall or stumble?
Which dependencies proved most fragile?
Output: Action plan under fire
A distilled set of lessons, captured in plain language.
Prioritised fixes that can be implemented before the next real incident.
Who it is for¶
This workshop is designed for teams who cannot afford to discover weaknesses during the real thing. We adapt the format for:
Executive crisis response groups.
IT & security operations centres.
Cross-functional project teams with high dependencies.
Organisations preparing for audits, certifications, or public scrutiny.