Exercising is a critical component of an effective crisis, emergency, or resiliency program. In fact, barring an actual crisis or event, it is the only way a team can build or enhance its capability. Exercising increases team cohesion; improves individual understanding; validates and improves written plans to ensure that they are aligned and mutually supportive; and just generally helps an organization become crisis ready.
The BMCG team has conducted hundreds of exercises to help our clients reach specific and measurable levels of performance. We do this by taking our hard-learned lessons in helping clients manage real-time issues and crises and applying them to our training and exercising programs. In fact, we believe it is critical that anyone who is developing a crisis management exercise actually has first-hand experience in the midst of a crisis.
At BMCG, we don’t spoon-feed. We like ambiguity and lack of information. We demand realism and don’t allow cozy assumptions. Crises are hard. Sugarcoating during an exercise doesn’t help.
We offer the following types of exercises:
Tabletop: An efficient and effective way to increase understanding and awareness, BMCG facilitates scenario-based discussions based on realistic crisis situations to help teams define, validate, and refine policies and plans.
Command Post: A more challenging format than a tabletop, activated teams work to address the issue and operate as a team, consistent with their meeting process and tools.
Functional: A far more realistic and complex exercise, information is provided to participants through hundreds of specific injects (whether email, phone call, text, or video) to the team or teams who need to actively coordinate with each other and a “simulation cell” that simulates non-playing roles.
Full-Scale: all components of a functional exercise together with specific physical deployments, such as relocation of operations, conducting a live press conference or holding town hall, engagement of third-party responders such as police or EMS.
Exercising Methodology
We follow a four-step exercise design process, depicted below.
