How to Supercharge Your Crisis Training
Current training approaches don’t prepare leaders for the unpredictability of today’s crises. Learn 10 ways to improve your organization’s simulations — and leaders’ ability to adapt.
John Holcroft/Ikon Images
Typical crisis simulations don’t train leaders for today’s unpredictable disruptions. Modern crises — like the global CrowdStrike outage and Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse — strike without warning or a playbook to guide a leader’s response. Instead of just testing predefined response plans, organizations need to supercharge their crisis simulations to develop leaders’ real-time adaptability. Consider 10 ways to design simulations that prepare executives for the unprecedented.
Crises now hit organizations hard, fast, and in ways that few leaders see coming. When cybersecurity company CrowdStrike released a faulty update to its software in 2024, it triggered a massive global outage that crashed 8.5 million Microsoft Windows systems. In 2021, a container ship blocked the Suez Canal, halting nearly $10 billion in global trade per day and exposing critical vulnerabilities in supply chains. And in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic threw the world into turmoil overnight, disrupting economies, industries, and daily life on an unprecedented scale.
Factors driving disruptive crises like these include rapid technology advances, cyberthreats, climate disruptions, geopolitical tensions, and societal polarization. In this environment, leaders need to make decisions under extreme pressure and adapt quickly. Most crisis training, however, does not prepare them for that.
Traditional crisis simulations help organizations rehearse for anticipated disruptions by stress-testing existing protocols and team coordination. While these exercises can validate response plans, they assume that risks can be predicted or controlled. That makes sense for creating contingency measures for hurricanes or industrial accidents, for example. But what happens when a crisis emerges that doesn’t have a playbook that leaders can follow?
Organizations must evolve their crisis simulations to expose leaders to cascading failures, ambiguous threats, ethical dilemmas, and high-pressure decision-making challenges. These “supercharged” simulations cultivate critical leadership capabilities, such as agility and situational awareness, to improve both individual and organizational resilience.
As unpredictable events become more complex and interconnected, leaders should embrace a new paradigm of crisis preparedness. By supercharging crisis simulations, organizations can equip their leaders with the skills and mindset needed to navigate uncertainty, mitigate risks, and drive effective responses. Let’s explore why your organization should take this approach, and how to design supercharged simulations.
Why Adaptability Matters More Now
The most disruptive crises often stem from “unknown unknowns” — events so unprecedented or complex that they defy established protocols and prior experience. Unlike “known unknowns,” which are risks we know we don’t fully understand, unknown unknowns are challenges we did not even know could exist. Such events could include the sudden collapse of a stable government or company, an AI-driven market disruption, a cascading series of supply chain failures triggered by infrastructure breakdowns, or the launch of a new technology that leads to unforeseen consequences.
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John Knapp