Have you been able to put the pieces of your exercise program together? Is your organization’s exercise program preparing you for stakeholder communication in a crisis? Do you feel that your communication structure is adequately tested?
Exercise planners often don’t recognize the importance of effective stakeholder communication. This bias is evidenced in how often the words above are true. It shows up in funding: “Save some money, don’t include the JIC”. It shows up in exercise planning: “Hold a press conference” becomes the only JIC objective, the widest notion of communication that planners can envision.
The result?
Communicators and the stakeholder communication process end up either minimally tested or not tested at all. All the exercise planning and investment is expended on testing the physical response. The result? While an investment is made to ensure response capability, communicators don’t benefit.
Failing to prepare, or preparing to fail?
Preparation is vital, otherwise we face the possibility that we won’t be prepared for an actual crisis. As the adage goes, failing to prepare is preparing to fail. After watching or enduring crises, participating in exercise after exercise and spending uncounted dollars, is our organization any more prepared to provide effective stakeholder communication? Or are we conducting exercises in futility?
What is a communicator to do?
How can we prepare? What if we actually have the tools we need to accurately test our capability? What if we have all the pieces and just need to put them together? What if our exercise in futility could be an exercise in utility?
Create a JIC Tabletop Exercise
Put the pieces of your exercise program together. You can plan and conduct a dedicated tabletop exercise (TTX) for your communication team, incorporating full testing of the JIC functions without involving other parts of Incident Command. You can create a full TTX scenario and injects to test a combined JIC. You can use HSEEP principles to develop your TTX to reinforce JIC processes and test for specific capabilities to meet communication objectives.
It is possible, perhaps even preferable, to create and conduct a TTX specifically for your communication team. Its likely you already have all the pieces you need for an effective TTX:
- Has your organization participated in any functional exercises recently?
- If so you have the scenario.
- Does your organization have an Emergency Response Plan, or the equivalent?
- If so, you have the physical response activities.
- Do you have a crisis communication plan?
- If so, you have the road map you want to test.
- Have your team members taken the available NIMS training courses?
- If so you’re all ready to be tested on your skills.
- Do you have authority to gather your communications team together for a few hours?
- If you do, you can test individual and group capacity at the same time.
All the pieces of the puzzle
If you have an exercise scenario, a communication plan, available training and authority to participate, you have all the pieces you need to prepare an effective crisis communication exercise. You can bring these pieces together to create and conduct a powerful exercise experience:
- Without limited, artificial objectives: You design the TTX to test communication actions you want.
- With great impact: Your people being tested on their capabilities for your organization.
- With every communicator involved: At your workplace, with your people.
- Without great expense: The cost will be your time and the time of those who participate.
- With great effectiveness: A TTX maximizes your organization’s response investment by multiplying it in delivering a comprehensive test of your communication capability.
A great investment
Communicators know what is needed for effective stakeholder communication. We’re trained in providing communication leadership to our respective organizations and we’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. Instead of trading war stories of trials, stress and failure, let’s multiply the effectiveness of our organization’s existing investment in response plan creation, training and exercise programs? We have all the information we need to demonstrate our team’s competence and capability. And we have the opportunity to demonstrate our ability to provide communication counsel to Incident Command along with our expertise.
What are you waiting for?
Put the pieces of your exercise program together!
Interested in more information? Contact me!