4 minute read
Crisis Testing: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
BCI World 2025 brought together leading experts in business continuity and crisis management for a series of insightful panels and discussions. One of the highlights for us as the was the BCI World Crisis Exercising Panel, which featured Craig Goldberg, CEO and founder of Battleground, alongside three other industry professionals. The panel focused on crisis testing, sharing practical experiences and lessons learned from real-world exercises. These insights were drawn from both the panel discussion and conversations held during the event.
Key Learnings from the BCI World Panel
Crisis exercises can build resilience, or burn credibility. After a recent panel on the good, bad, and ugly of crisis testing, here are the takeaways that actually move the needle.
The Good: What Works
- Create a true learning environment. Design exercises as practice, not punitive tests. People need psychological safety to surface weaknesses and learn.
- Plan with precision. Start with clear objectives and a simple, effective scenario that hits the outcomes you care about without turning into a circus.
- Keep it engaging. Skip death by PowerPoint. Use realistic injects and decision points. Consider “natural activation”, start at the business frontline, let issues percolate up to leadership—to mirror how crises really unfold.
The Bad: Where Exercises Go Sideways
- Poor preparation. Vague objectives, thin research, or a copy-paste scenario guarantees you’ll miss the mark.
- Rigid formats. Highly prescriptive, regulator-driven exercises can strangle learning if there’s no room to adapt.
- Losing the room. If people feel set up to fail, or the exercise feels irrelevant, they disengage, and won’t come back.
The Ugly: Mismatch and Maturity
- Wrong length, wrong complexity. Teams need crawl-walk-run progression. Overreach (or under-challenge) wastes time and erodes trust.
- One-size-fits-all. A marathon exercise for a team at “crawl” level is performative, not productive.
Practical Q&A: How to Get It Right
- How long should an exercise be? Match duration to team maturity, time available, and your objectives. Short, frequent reps are powerful for building muscle memory; longer formats are useful for complex, cross-functional coordination and executive alignment.
- How do you manage lots of exercises? Build a system. Keep catalogues of scenarios and injects, map everything to objectives, track outcomes and lessons learned, and iterate. Consistency beats heroics.
- How do you make it fun and real? Design for interaction: injects, role-play, media pressure, timeline compressions. Keep the narrative moving and the decisions consequential.
Leadership’s Role: Use Your Top Table Wisely
- CEO in the room, not running the room. The CEO should practice their true role, spokesperson, strategic direction, stakeholder management, while the crisis team manages the incident.
- Board supports, doesn’t steer. Clarify that the board’s job is oversight and support, not operational control during a crisis.
Bottom Line
Aim for exercises that are targeted, objective-led, and psychologically safe. Keep them engaging and right-sized for your team’s maturity. Build a repeatable system with clear objectives, reusable materials, and continuous improvement. Do that, and people will want to come back—and your organisation will be measurably more resilient when it counts.
To further explore these learnings and discuss how Battleground can support your organisation’s crisis testing and business continuity efforts, reach out to Battleground for a tailored consultation. Their expertise and practical insights can help you design and implement effective crisis exercises that drive real improvement and resilience.
