Tabletop Exercise

Before an organisation trusts its crisis team with a real event, it needs a safe way to find out how that team thinks together. A tabletop exercise exists for exactly that: the team walks through a scenario in a meeting room, making the decisions they would make in reality, without touching live operations. For leadership it answers a first-hours question in advance — will the people around this table actually agree on who declares, who spends and who speaks. It is the cheapest test of the most expensive assumptions.

In practice a tabletop takes 2 to 4 hours, led by a facilitator with a scripted scenario and timed injects: a supplier declares force majeure at 09:00, a journalist calls at 10:30, the regulator asks for a statement by the end of the day. Participants respond using the actual plan, role cards and thresholds — not from memory — while an observer records gaps, hesitations and decisions that lacked authority. Sessions are scheduled at least annually for the crisis team, and after major changes such as a new ERP or a reorganisation. The output is a short report with owned actions, feeding the lessons-learned loop.

The characteristic mistake is turning the tabletop into a presentation: slides are shown, everyone nods, and no decision is actually made or challenged. A session without a single uncomfortable moment has not tested anything. In the ERGP programme, designing and running such exercises is part of module M4, Crisis management and decision making.