Building an exercise programme¶
A single exercise is an event. A programme is a learning system. The difference is not frequency: it is whether each exercise informs the next, and whether the organisation’s model of its own capability is being updated rather than just tested.
Starting where you are¶
The ChangeShop framing applies here: the organisation already has an incident response capability, however informal. A first exercise does not introduce simulation into a vacuum. It introduces a new kind of scrutiny into a system that has already adapted to the absence of it. The resistance that sometimes meets a new exercise programme is not obstruction. It is the system registering that something is changing.
Start with a single 90-minute tabletop. Keep the scenario focused and the objectives narrow: one or two things you genuinely want to learn about the team’s capability, not a comprehensive test of everything at once. The retrospective after that first exercise is more important than the exercise itself: it establishes the practice of honest review, which is what the programme depends on.
Building over time¶
Complexity and duration increase as the team’s familiarity with the format grows and as the safety controls have been demonstrated to hold. The progression is not a curriculum: it is a response to what each exercise reveals. If the first tabletop surfaces a fundamental gap in role clarity, the second exercise addresses that gap, not move on to more sophisticated scenarios.
Add live injects when the tabletop format is producing confident, if theoretical, responses. Live injects test whether the understanding demonstrated in the tabletop survives contact with time pressure and ambiguous information. They often reveal that it does not, at least initially. That is the point.
Involve more teams as the core group develops shared understanding and the exercise structure is stable enough to extend. Expanding participation before the format is established tends to produce exercises that are more concerned with logistics than learning.
What makes a programme rather than a series of events¶
A programme has memory. Each exercise is documented: not just the action items, but the questions it raised and the assumptions it exposed. Those questions become the seed of the next exercise.
A programme has facilitators who develop over time. Running exercises well is a skill, and it develops through practice and reflection. Internal facilitators who understand the organisation are often more valuable than external ones who are technically skilled but lack the context to ask the questions that reach the structural layer.
A programme tracks recurrence. If the same class of failure appears in multiple exercises, it is not an exercise design problem. It is a finding about the conditions the exercises have not yet reached. That finding deserves explicit attention: what structural change would alter the conditions, and who has the authority to make it?