Drawing on 35 years of practical experience – and a broad body of academic research – Charlie Maclean-Bristol explores how to design exercises that lead to personal and organisational change.
Ticking the box
For senior managers and those named within a crisis management or business continuity plan, taking part in exercises can feel like routine medical screening. You may not look forward to it; it’s likely to be unpleasant, but missing your appointment and not being screened could lead to something much worse.
In the same way, most people who attend an exercise do so because they feel it’s a necessary evil. They don’t want to be found wanting if an incident occurs, but they secretly hope it never happens and attend the exercise just in case. They know they need to tick the box, so they give up their annual 3 hours and move on “trained and ready”. Of course, some see the importance of exercise, are keen to attend and enjoy the experience, but the majority, I think, only attend because they have been told they must.
As practitioners, I don’t think we should be pushing the benefits of exercises or explaining why we are doing them. For most people, the requirement is obvious. What we must do, however, is respect participants’ time and design exercises that give them the maximum benefit from taking part. A badly designed and executed exercise is, in my view, worse than doing nothing at all and will make those who attended less likely to turn up in the future.
We should also make sure that our exercise actually makes a change at both an organisational and individual level. Too often, the learning from an exercise is rapidly forgotten and only revisited at the next exercise a year later. Avoiding this requires deliberate planning and careful design – thinking through how the exercise is conducted to ensure that lasting change and learning is achieved.
Where practice meets theory
As I research a new book on business continuity exercises, I’ve been revisiting the academic theory behind effective learning and how it applies to the design and delivery of BC exercises.
Although I suspect much of what is written in the academic literature on learning is already included in practitioners’, even if it is not consciously applied, there are 3 changes that, if incorporated into exercises, would make a noticeable improvement to learning outcomes. These are:
- Conducting training prior to the exercise
- Tailoring exercises to competencies and learning styles
- Conducting both hot and cold debriefs
Conducting training prior to the exercise
First, all participants should review the plan that will be used during the exercise. The aim is to familiarise themselves with its contents and refresh their understanding of their specific role. This should be completed individually, in their own time, rather than as a group session.
Second, there should be structured training for everyone taking part in the exercise. This could be a 30-minute refresher covering key elements of the plan, such as logging requirements, the incident management cycle and the use of agendas. It should also include learning points from the previous exercise, reminding participants of their roles, the activities they are expected to carry out, and any plan content they are likely to rely on. The goal is to ensure participants are prepared to take part confidently and consistently.
Training can be delivered 1–2 weeks before the exercise, or provided as a voice-over presentation, slides or a short recording that participants can watch in their own time. While this does require additional participant time, it significantly improves performance during the exercise and encourages effective use of the plan as a “handrail” for managing the incident. This is markedly better than participants skimming the plan during the exercise or failing to use the tools and techniques available because they have forgotten they exist.
Tailoring the exercise to team members’ competencies and learning styles
When designing the exercise, you can incorporate several elements to enhance the learning experience. Minor changes can make a major difference to what people learn from the exercise.
You should ensure that the exercise takes into account verbal, visual and kinaesthetic learning styles. By including elements of each, you ensure that different learners feel engaged.
While verbal, visual and kinaesthetic preferences are helpful, they are only one way of understanding how people learn. Academics Peter Honey and Alan Mumford proposed a different classification, dividing learners into 4 groups: “Activists”, “Reflectors”, “Theorists” and “Pragmatists”.
For exercise designers, this offers another useful lens. It helps you think less about content and more about how different personalities engage with the experience.
For Activists, who are open-minded and enthusiastic about new experiences, you need to make sure the exercise has opportunities for everyone to contribute, with activities such as incident team meetings, so they feel engaged and involved in the exercise play.
Reflectors prefer to step back, observe and take time before acting. Ensure there is a cold debrief that gives them time to reflect after the exercise. Allowing them to attend as observers can also support their learning.
Theorists value structure and clarity, so making sure there are clear phases to the exercise that correspond to the plan, and using agendas for meetings, will meet their needs.
Pragmatists focus on applying learning directly to real-world tasks, so they tend to thrive in realistic scenarios drawn from incidents that have occurred in other organisations.
A different perspective comes from Behaviourist Learning Theory, developed through the work of B.F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov. Rather than focussing on how people prefer to learn, it looks at how behaviours are formed and reinforced. It views learners as passive recipients who respond to stimuli, with learning reinforced through repetition, rewards and consequences.
A behaviourist approach relies on learning Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for incident management, then using them during the response. This type of learning is often used in a military context where troops are taught standard ways of responding which can be carried out instinctively without needing to think through each step. This is especially important in high-risk situations, where freezing and taking no action can place people in danger.
Exercises should be developed so participants have opportunities to apply taught SOPs. These could include how to set up an incident team meeting, use checklists and log and record actions. Post-exercise feedback should play a key role in reinforcing correct responses, correcting errors or deciding that additional training is required.
At the other end of the spectrum is Problem Based Learning. Here, the goal is not repetition but discovery. Learners develop knowledge and skills by working through complex real-world problems. They must take responsibility for identifying what they need to know and how to find it. To incorporate this into your exercise, you need to give participants situations that require them to gather further information and make sense of what’s happening before deciding and implementing their solution. For Problem Based Learning to be effective, those taking part in the exercise need to be given a genuinely complex problem to solve.
Debriefing: Conducting hot and cold debriefs
Across these theories, the importance of debriefs is clear, as they enable participants to reflect on what they have learned.
I believe at least 20% of the exercise time should be allocated to a hot debrief. It’s also essential to schedule time after the exercise for a cold debrief, which many practitioners, including myself, struggle to find the time to do.
Having a cold debrief allows people to reflect on their experience and view it from a different perspective, rather than through the adrenaline-fuelled euphoria that can occur during the hot debrief at the end of an exercise.
Most learning theories emphasise the importance of reflection and providing learners with time to process and learn from their experiences, and a cold debrief offers that space for learning to be recognised.
Achieving a lasting impact after your exercises
The exercise is over, and most participants breathe a sigh of relief before returning to their day jobs. A post-exercise report is produced, but usually the actions focus on business continuity or technology, so there is no extra work to do. There is little focus on behavioural change. And so as a result, the lessons learned during the exercise slowly fade and have to be relearned the following year.
One way to address this is through the principle of Double-Loop Learning, first proposed by organisational theorists Chris Argyris and Donald Schön.
Single-loop learning occurs when individuals or organisations detect and correct errors, but to achieve double-loop learning, exercise participants need to question and change the underlying assumptions, values or strategies that underpin their actions. Too often, in my experience, only single-loop learning is achieved due to a lack of engagement and reflection after the exercise to explore issues and behavioural change.
When you have limited time with exercise participants, you must use it deliberately. To ensure the best use of the participants’ time, to ensure learning takes place, and exercise leads to actual change, double-loop learning needs to be achieved. This, I believe, will only occur if training is conducted beforehand, so participants learn new skills and responses rather than simply recalling what they learned the previous year. This requires designing exercises that reflect different learning styles and allocating dedicated time for reflection through a structured cold debrief. Only by conducting these additional activities on top of a well-planned and executed exercise will double-loop learning take place.
Exercises that go beyond box-ticking
An exercise should do more than confirm that a plan exists. It should improve how people think, decide and act under pressure. While many practitioners naturally apply some of the best practices from learning theory in their exercise design, taking the time to understand those theories and apply them deliberately helps ensure exercises lead to lasting change rather than becoming an annual box-ticking activity. That is the difference between meeting a requirement and improving resilience.