Imagine this:
It’s midnight. The Pacific Northwest has just been hit by a magnitude-7.8 quake. Critical infrastructure is damaged. Communications are spotty. Executives are waking up in remote locations. Panic begins to infect conversations. Now ask: When the real moment comes, do your leaders freeze—or already know what to do?
That “freeze-vs-flow” moment is exactly why tabletop exercises matter. They’re not just training events; they’re leadership incubators, game-changers, and the difference between being overwhelmed or being resilient.
Defining the Challenge: Why Crisis Leadership Is Under Greater Pressure Than Ever
Organizations today face more complexity, speed, and uncertainty than just a few years ago. Disasters are cross-functional (think cyber + physical + reputational). Stakeholders expect fast, transparent responses. Regulations demand proof of readiness.
Some recent stats:
- A 2025 study shows that discussion-based crisis exercises (like tabletop exercises) significantly improve coordination, communication, decision-making, and resource allocation. (ScienceDirect)
- In disaster preparedness for healthcare, a 2025 NCBI-published paper showed that tabletop disaster exercises led to a measurable increase in readiness among nurses and health workers. (PMC)
If leaders haven’t been through realistic crisis simulations, even the best written plan can collapse under the weight of the unknown.
Five Key Audience Pain Points — and How Tabletop Exercises Address Them
Before diving deeper, let’s talk about what keeps you up at night—and how tabletop exercises help.
|
Concern / Question |
Why It’s Valid |
How Tabletop Exercises Help |
|
“It costs time and money. Is it worth the investment?” |
Many leadership teams balk at carving out hours for scenario-walkthroughs when real work is pressing. |
Tabletops are relatively low cost compared to full-scale drills. They surface critical gaps early (before they lead to big losses). The return on preparedness often dwarfs the investment—for downtime, reputation, or worse. |
|
“Will this really simulate what goes wrong under stress?” |
Skepticism: talk through vs chaos of real crisis. Without realistic pressure/test, learning is superficial. |
Good tabletop exercises include “injects” (surprise developments), multiple stakeholders, real decision-points. They build muscle memory for pressure, not just plan reading. |
|
“How do we get executives and staff to engage fully rather than check a box?” |
If leadership sees this as theory or academic, engagement is minimal. The exercise becomes stale. |
Including executives in design, having clear purposes (e.g. testing inter-department communications, or supply chain decisions), ensuring the scenarios are highly relevant, helps. Also, debriefs with honest feedback and real follow-through build credibility. |
|
“What if we uncover terrible gaps? Does that make us look weak, or trigger risk?” |
Fear: exposing shortcomings in front of peers / boards / inspectorial bodies. |
Better to expose them in a tabletop than in a crisis. Use post-mortem to convert gaps into improvement plans. Over time, organizations that do regular practice show stronger resilience and fewer surprises. |
|
“How often / what kinds of exercises are enough?” |
Frequency and relevance matter. One-off will degrade; too many without variation wastes resources. |
Best practice is at least annually for core leadership; more frequently for high-risk areas / critical functions; mixing themes (cyber, natural disaster, reputational, supply chain) so surprises remain plausible. |
Structure & Best Practices: What Makes Tabletop Exercises Truly Effective
I’ve seen many exercises that look good on paper but underperform—because they lack structure, realism, or follow-up. Based on experience and literature (including expert-derived lessons) (ScienceDirect), here’s how to build and deliver tabletop exercises that deliver:
- Clear objectives first
Identify what you want to test: is it crisis communications? Leadership decision between competing pressures? Resource allocation? Regulatory compliance? This guides scenario design and participation. - Relevant, realistic scenario with injects
The scenario should mirror threats you reasonably might face. Add surprises (“injects”) that mimic how real crises evolve—unexpected failures, cascading problems, stakeholder interference. - Cross-functional stakeholder participation
Not just “CISO + IT.” Include legal, operations, HR, PR & communications, finance, executives. Maybe even vendors. The more perspectives, the richer the learning—and the more aligned your crisis response will be. - Strong facilitation and evaluation(s)
Good facilitation keeps the group on track, pushes tough decisions, ensures people are speaking. Evaluators (often behind the scenes) track time delays, miscommunications, role confusion. The debrief matters. - Debrief + action plan
After the exercise, bring out what worked, what didn’t, root causes of failures. Produce a clear action plan with named owners and deadlines. Without follow-up, the whole thing becomes a morale-boost but no change.
Related: Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Tabletop Exercises for Executive Leadership Teams
Case Studies: Failure When Training Is Neglected + Success from Strong Prep
Let’s look at two examples one where neglect cost dearly, and one where strong preparation paid off.
⌠Case: Crimson Contagion (USA, 2019)
This was a large functional exercise simulating a severe influenza pandemic in the U.S. involving federal, state, local, and private entities. The simulation exposed that resource request processes were not standardized or well understood, roles and responsibilities were unclear, and coordination, especially across jurisdictional lines, was slow and inconsistent. (Wikipedia)
Fast forward: when COVID-19 hit in 2020, many of the shortfalls identified in Crimson Contagion—such as lack of clarity in interagency roles and underestimating logistics constraints—showed up in real life. Because the earlier exercise recommendations were not fully implemented or sustained, the country was caught with gaps in supply chains, coordination, and resource mobilization.
✅ Case: Financial Institution BCP Tabletop Test — Seeing the Gap Before the Storm
Among practitioners, there’s a repeated story (from recent business continuity practice) where a financial institution during routine tabletop testing realized that their “mobile branch” backup plan (designed to deploy mobile service units in case of loss of branch location) was nothing more than an empty trailer without equipment or network access. Also, IT discovered that they lacked sufficient VPN licenses to support remote work survivors. These were major vulnerabilities, but because of the exercise, adjustments were made months before any real disruption. When COVID-19 forced many branches to close and staff to work from home, this institution was able to shift operations more smoothly than many peers. (Ncontracts)
Common Mistakes (Pitfalls) to Avoid
Here’s a “common mistakes” box—things I’ve seen organizations do that reduce the value of tabletop exercises:
- Running generic scenarios that don’t match your threat landscape.
- Not involving leadership or thinking of the exercise as only for “operational folks.”
- Skipping the “injects” or surprises—everything goes too smoothly, so no learning under stress.
- Failing to document lessons or assigning no ownership to fixes so gaps persist.
- Using the same format and scenario every time—desensitization sets in; no sense of urgency or novelty.
Why ICMC & Conferences Matter in This Journey
ICMC is one of those rare spaces where executives, resilience officers, emergency managers, security leaders, and trainers gather—and the value of cross-pollination is huge. You don’t just learn from theory; you swap war stories, get exposed to fresh scenarios, to ideas of injects you hadn’t considered, and to perspectives (public/private sector, different industries) that force you to question your blind spots.
In short: conferences and resilience courses like ICMC are training grounds for training—you get ideas, you get challenged, you see what others are doing well (and poorly), and you build networks to sustain readiness and accountability.
Quick Takeaways: What You Can Do Now
To build your readiness posture and sharpen crisis leadership, try these steps:
- Design and run a tabletop exercise with your leadership team — pick a high-probability threat, include multiple departments, and make sure you introduce “surprises” during the session.
- Mandate regular frequency — at least annually for executives; quarterly or semi-annually for operational functions; adjust based on risk profile.
- Bring in external facilitators or peer observers — someone who can challenge assumptions, push boundaries, ask uncomfortable questions.
- Use after-action debriefs tightly — produce an action plan with named owners, deadlines, and tracking. Review in leadership meetings.
- Leverage ICMC sessions / peer input — attend tabletop-oriented workshops, bring back case-studies from other organizations, and adapt methods you see good success in.
Conclusion & Call to Act
When a crisis truly hits—not a simulation—you don’t want to learn on the fly. Leadership, coordination, and judgment under pressure: those are cultivated, practiced, tested. Tabletop exercises aren’t luxury extras; they are essential parts of crisis leadership development—and your insurance against chaos.
If you’re at ICMC, I encourage you to review the agenda with an eye for sessions that offer tabletop design, facilitation techniques, or after-action/debrief methods. Join one, bring back what works, and maybe even lead one yourself. And connect: share scenarios, challenges, and success stories—isn’t that what our community does best?
Together, let’s make sure when the alarm sounds, we don’t freeze. We lead.
