Exercising your plans

One of the hardest hitting boxing adages is “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” That’s why boxers will spend many hours sparring before they get near a real opponent. The equivalent of a punch in the face for most organisations is a crisis that plays out in public. Which is why you shouldn’t just have a crisis plan, you need to test it. You should assess what your crises could be. It’s crucial to plan your response to as part of a cohesive crisis comms strategy. But if you aren’t exercising those plans, they could be useless.

Exercising your plans since 2001

Exercising your plans is as important as writing them in the first place. Since 2001 Scott Hamilton has planned and led multiple major incident exercises. We work with military and governmental bodies, water and energy utilities, health, HE and research bodies, and food and drink, grocery, retail, construction, IT, mobile and energy supply corporates. (We can help you write your plans, too, of course. See more here.)

From a half day tabletop to multi-day, live play, multi-agency responces, we can work with you. We’ll help develop, plan and deliver a rigorous test of your comms response – and the response of all your organisational functions that feed into it.

Exercise experience provides crucial learning

Scott Hamilton Media research and write scenarios that bring the issues to life. We have exercised medical experiments, severe weather, blackouts, cyberattacks, animal pandemics, blood shortages, natural gas shortages, protester incursion onto sites, and industrial and military accidents. We then work with you to create the most realistic, effective, insightful experience for the staffing, resource and time you’ve got. And then we come to you and we play it out, providing the sorts of real life, in-play insights that stick with your teams for years to come.

After testing your plan we’ll tell you what you can do better

We create and deliver exercises that allow organisations to rehearse reactive comms, hone their incident responses and mitigate risk. Exercises can even be expanded to simulate press conferences and can incorporate full social media and customer contact interaction through collaboration with leading social simulation partners. And afterwards we’ll tell you what went right, what went wrong, and what to do about it. Get in touch to find out how we can support you in exercising your plans.