Practice makes perfect, right?
So we exercise, or drill, or run tabletops. By practicing, we build ‘muscle memory’ that ensures our capability of responding under stress. This ensures that we will take the right actions at the right time, and by doing so we will always be ready to leap into action to defend our organization’s virtue in a crisis.
Sounds good! But repetition in training often lacks quality control. What if we are practicing the wrong actions? What if all our training is actually teaching us to do the wrong thing? What if our investment is yielding a negative return?
How does an exercise help us?
For the vast majority of us, we plan and prepare for what never actually happens. That’s the reality of response planning; if the events we plan and prepare for happened frequently, our organization would either suspend risky operations, or be driven out of existence. Preparation is prevalent. Responses are rare. So we depend on some form of training and exercising to maintain our edge.
Let’s look at a series of questions to determine if we’re really accomplishing our preparedness goal in our exercise regime:
1. Did your last exercise utilize a scenario from an actual event?
Most exercises feature generalized scenarios created as accretions of real or legendary previous incidents. They usually are not specific to your organization or product. They often feature external causes of the event you must respond to. In oil spill responses, we seem to always deal with a runaway barge, usually named ‘Lucky Lady’ or some such fabrication.
We prepare for OUR organization’s welfare, and any actual response will be due to something happening to OUR organization. At the least we should exercise against what will actually happen to US, not what could have happened to anyone else.
When we fail to make our exercises as specific to our own operations as possible, we’re wasting our exercise investment on hypothetical, unrelated responses. We’re not practicing how we will have to play. The argument is made that ‘we’re getting ready for anything’, but we’re missing the opportunity to practice specific steps in the specific response environment we will have to actually perform in.
2. Did your last exercise utilize a scenario that was actually your organization’s fault?
This seldom happens. There seems to be an aversion to fault in the exercise world; a fear that having something go wrong that was our fault will be too hard to bear, or will include unnecessary stress on the players. So we end up with the runaway barge striking our good and noble wharf, or tanker, or bridge. We have an activist blow something up, a Navy ship striking our tanker. We have a contractor tip something over, a storage tank suddenly rupture, an asteroid hitting our distribution dock, a vampire attack.
Why? Pretty much by definition, any actual response you participate in will involve your own operations, most likely due to human error or poor maintenance, or mismanagement. It won’t be due to a runaway barge, an asteroid impact or vampires. It will be your fault.
The practice of avoiding fault in exercising is actually a disservice to all of us. In an actual event we will be under stress from the event and it’s impact, as well duress from the level of public attention and outrage. But we will also be reeling from our recognition that it shouldn’t have happened, that we caused it, that it was our fault. This is particularly challenging if there are injuries or fatalities. Nobody wants to go there. But there we will be. Would you rather practice with discomfort, or response without readiness?
Exercising seems to value the ‘kumbayah’ dynamic – it “ … does not examine the issues or is revelatory of cockeyed optimism.” We gather around an exercise campfire to respond to an imaginary scenario with above-average skill. Then we proclaim to ourselves that we are ‘ready for the real thing’. But if we’re not exercising in an environment of fault, we’re missing valuable exposure to all the stress, blame and upset that comes at us in a real response.
Of course, we also need to exercise against natural disasters, where the dynamic changes – ironically easier for communicators, but much more difficult for responders. As communicators, we get a hall pass since we didn’t cause it. But our responder cohorts still have to stop it and clean it up, often in a much more resource-constrained environment.
Side note, communicators: Spend some time talking with your operators about the challenges they face in a natural disaster. It will help you prepare better external messaging when you know what they’re going through.
3. Was your last exercise an unannounced exercise?
When was the last real crisis that gave you advance notice? The closest a communicator gets to advance notice is in issue management: Sometimes an emerging issue will give us advance warning that a crisis is about to break out. Sometimes that margin of notice is vanishingly small.
Unannounced large-scale exercises are almost impossible to conduct. No organization can endure business disruptions that aren’t due to real events. Exercise planners simply can’t create a large, spontaneous event that instantly occupies organization-wide resources without advance notice (this is actually a good description of an actual crisis). At the same time, this reality inevitably foster unreality. You can participate in every exercise your organization conducts throughout your career, and never be ready for the 2:00 a.m. call that we all dread.
4. Did your last exercise use real-time conditions in the scenario?
Most exercise scenarios proscribe all relevant conditions – so tide, precipitation, temperature, even time are all controlled for accurate measurements. While understandable to control complexities of planning the exercise, this is again completely unrealistic for preparation. We never get to pick the weather, times or tides in an actual event. So we’re not tested against the vagaries of time and chance.
5. Did your last exercise have measurable objectives?
Here’s a test; what were they? If you don’t remember, you may not have had any. It’s still common for communicators to be tested by one requirement, conducting a press conference. Sometimes a number of stakeholder calls are supposed to be answered. Occasionally a social media simulator will be used to ‘test’ response capability.
As a communicator, you know that these objectives aren’t adequate for actual preparation. Plus, how were they measured? My experience is that communications product is measured by checkbox; yes or no. No review or qualification of content or competency. So you end up with a ‘pass’ grade that doesn’t reflect real world capability or competence.
6. Were exercise objectives based on identified performance shortfalls?
Why were you tested on what you were tested? Did a previous exercise expose shortfalls in capabilities? Not if the previous exercise was graded ‘pass/fail’ How would an exercise planner know what a communication shortfall looked like? During exercise planning, were you asked to share what you knew you should be tested on? If exercise objectives aren’t based on measurable performance or identified improvement needs, what are you learning, or proving for capability?
7. Did you participate in an exercise hot-wash?
Of course you did! Every exercise ends with a hot-wash. Then what? Have you ever received a report afterward that identified successes and failures, with specific recommendations to incorporate successes in best practices and address failures in future exercises? If not, what benefit have you gained from the exercise?
8. Were you asked to justify your exercise performance against set objectives?
No you weren’t. The objectives were likely neither detailed nor demanding enough to accurately assess performance, so how could you be challenged on your success? Of course in the hot-wash you discussed what didn’t work, likely attributing it to some external or drill-only cause, even excused it as ‘part of the drill dynamics’. But without specific objectives that are measurable and specific injects to test against, you likely have never been challenged specifically with what you should have done better. So you’ve never actually been stress-tested.
9. Did you wonder how you really did afterward?
Have you ever left an exercise with the gnawing conviction that you blew it? Have you wondered how you would have done if it had been real? The hot-wash we all participate in often serves as a safety valve, where we can express our concerns and then forget them, secure in the knowledge that someone else is keeping track. But they aren’t. If communicators in the room don’t note and record issues, challenges and failures, they will disappear into the mists of time. And that is where they usually end up.
10. Did you come home with your own ‘lessons learned’?
Most of us come home with memories of the river cruise or dinner, the awards session, the buffet line. We might remember the view from our hotel room or the taxi ride to the conference center. We might even remember the skimmer demo, or the new social media tracking tool we saw. But do we come home with personal lessons learned? Do we decide to figure out how to do something better?
11. Did you make revisions to your Crisis Communication Plan after the exercise?
Was any evaluation or lesson learned so compelling that you revised your Crisis Communication Plan afterward? What did you learn that forced you to reconsider training, or policy or preparation? If you didn’t, was the investment in attending the exercise worth it?
What was your exercise success?
All of these are challenging questions, and if you were able to answer ‘yes’ to several of these questions, you’re doing well! Most likely, many of your answers are ‘No’. You are in fact, inadvertently and with good will, exercising in futility.
Good news!
Yes, there is good news! Every one of these questions can be turned to a ‘Yes’ for communicators! You hold a unique role in responses that gives you much more flexibility to thoroughly test yourselves. There are exercise actions you can take to ensure your response communication capability.
These will be the topic of my next post. Stay tuned!