Advanced · Self-paced learning
Preparing Tabletop Facilitation: Running Notes, Interventions and Debrief
Prepare to facilitate a tabletop exercise: write opening questions, plan interventions and create a guide for the debrief.
Read the descriptionAdvanced · Self-paced learning
Designing and Evaluating Crisis Exercises
Inquiry This course is not yet bookable.
Plan a 90-minute tabletop exercise for a site or business unit. Identify the decisions the crisis team should make during the exercise and develop a scenario around those decisions. For each inject, set the time and recipient and the decision it should prompt. Record who has authority to decide, who observes and when the exercise must stop.
An example shows why a quick decision alone does not prove a relocation succeeded: the exercise record contains neither an instruction to the alternative site nor confirmation from it. You add suitable injects and observation tasks to your own plan, work through a sequence and revise the exercise.
A small tabletop simulator is planned as a course companion. Use it to edit your scenario, control the injects and record observations. Save, reopen and continue working on your exercise; no AI features are required.
What you will work on
- Derive three to five exercise objectives from a management question and define what the exercise and its remit exclude.
- Produce a timed inject plan linking information events to expected decisions, roles, observations and stop or escalation rules.
- Work through an inject sequence and improve the inject and evaluation plan when the exercise record lacks instructions or responses
Who it is for
- Exercise owners
- Crisis management and business continuity leads
- Department heads with an exercise remit
Topics
- Exercise remit, mandate and non-goals derived from a management question
- Exercise objectives, decision points and observations needed for evaluation
- Developing the exercise scenario, recording assumptions and adjusting the scenario when new information emerges
- Inject plan, timing and information flow
- Roles, decision rights, stop and escalation rules
- Observation, evaluation, prioritisation and revision of the exercise design
Your result
Keep your scenario, inject texts, running order and observation tasks. You have worked through one sequence and revised the inject and evaluation plan accordingly.
Prerequisites
Experience in crisis, business continuity or emergency response work, plus access to the objectives, roles and escalation paths of one defined area or a mandate to prepare a template. If information is missing or confidential, use a course case.
Format and approach
Planned as structured self-study over five to six hours, with course-specific templates, worked examples and self-checks.
Planned learning time: 5–6 hours