Why a plan only works once you've practised it

A crisis plan on paper gives you something to hold on to. Whether it holds up under pressure, you only know once your team has worked with it. What does research say about this? And how can you get started within your own organisation?

If your organisation has drawn up its crisis management plan, you’re already well on your way. The roles are described, the procedures are clear, and thought has gone into how you want to deal with emergencies. It’s a logical first step. But unfortunately it is often taken under time pressure, in the run-up to an audit or a tender.

Yet every plan contains a silent assumption. It assumes that the people who have to carry it out know it, can read it calmly and will then follow the procedures as described. Unfortunately, a crisis rarely offers those conditions.

Time pressure and unfamiliar circumstances

When it really comes down to it, a crisis takes an unexpected turn. The situation turns out not to be quite what was imagined beforehand. Time pressure and stress create chaos within minutes. Decisions get stuck in discussion and the carefully drafted procedures are nowhere to be seen. Not because it was a bad plan, or because the people weren’t capable. But because it was written at a time when ‘business as usual’ was the norm. And it doesn’t account for the pressure a crisis brings.

Having a plan is not the same as knowing it

This pattern is not unique. In England, for example, every hospital is legally required to have a plan for a major incident. A study of doctors who would take on a key role in a major incident found that half had not read the plan and only 36 per cent knew which task they would be given¹.

Every organisation can learn from this. The plan existed, it had been approved and it complied with the law. It just wasn’t alive among the people who had to carry it out.

Practising under pressure makes the difference

So, unfortunately, you can’t simply assume that when it matters, people in your organisation will be able to pick up the plan and get to work. Pressure simply changes our behaviour and the way we make decisions. Research shows that people under stress make less favourable and riskier decisions². Stress makes it harder to weigh things up calmly.

Research also shows how experienced decision-makers do make good decisions under time pressure: they don’t compare options, but recognise a situation they have been through before and act on it³. That is exactly what an exercise gives you. Anyone who has already worked through a scenario no longer needs to read the plan. They recognise the moment.

What exercising demonstrably delivers

Research shows that team training improves both teamwork and team performance⁴. People do need to take an active part, though: passive listening alone does little. A presentation about the plan is therefore no substitute for an exercise in which a select team actually works with it.

Research also shows that crisis exercises improve knowledge of procedures, confidence, and understanding of one’s own role and that of partners⁵. Responders who had taken part in an exercise shortly before the Manchester Arena attack knew the plans better and felt more confident during the real response⁶.

You learn the most after the exercise

An exercise without a proper debrief is a missed opportunity. Research shows that a debrief improves performance by around a quarter⁷.

Other research confirms this picture⁸. The effect is greatest when the debrief focuses on the team rather than on individuals, and works from an objective record of what happened. In other words: look at a timeline, log or recording instead of relying on memory alone.

That fits the way we see an exercise: not a moment of reckoning, but a shared look at the plan and at how people work together.

The standards count on exercising too

If you work with ISO 22301, you’ll know this already: the standard asks not only for plans, but also for an exercise programme and for evaluating it. ISO 45001 and ISO 27001 also call for periodic exercising of the emergency response. Dutch government organisations must test annually under the BIO2. And since August 2026, the Dutch Cybersecurity Act (Cyberbeveiligingswet) and the Critical Entities Resilience Act (Wet weerbaarheid kritieke entiteiten) have been in force, requiring more than 8,000 organisations to demonstrate that their resilience is in order.

So exercising is not an extra on top of the audit. It is the part of the standard that brings the plan to life.

How to start, even without a big budget

So how do you start? Say you want to prepare your organisation without having a large budget for it. What can you do yourself to get started?

Small and around the table. Start with a tabletop exercise of one and a half to two hours with the people named in the plan. A full simulation can come later.
One scenario that fits your organisation. An outage of a critical system, a fire at a supplier, a data breach. Choose something that is realistic for your organisation.
One unexpected twist. Someone in a key role can’t be reached, or the press calls sooner than expected. That’s where you’ll see the most.
Someone taking notes. Record who decided what, and when. That timeline is gold for the debrief.
A debrief without blame. Discuss the plan and the collaboration, not individuals.

Four questions for that debrief:

What did we expect to happen?
What actually happened, according to the timeline?
Where is the gap, and is it down to the plan or to the arrangements?
What will we change, who will do it, and when will we exercise again?

From paper to a team that can handle it

A plan on paper is a good first step. A plan your team knows is what takes you further. At Crisis Dynamics we write crisis and continuity plans that meet the requirements of ISO 22301, and then test them with a simulation that fits your organisation. That way the plan becomes a tool your team really knows.

You can’t prepare for every crisis, but you can make sure your team can handle any crisis.

Sources

Mawhinney, J.A. et al. (2019). Preparation for the next major incident: are we ready? Emergency Medicine Journal, 36(12).
Starcke, K. & Brand, M. (2016). Effects of stress on decisions under uncertainty: a meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin.
Klein, G. (1998). Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. MIT Press.
McEwan, D. et al. (2017). The effectiveness of teamwork training on teamwork behaviors and team performance. PLoS ONE, 12(1): e0169604.
Skryabina, E. et al. (2017). What is the value of health emergency preparedness exercises? International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 21, 274–283.
Skryabina, E. et al. (2020). The role of emergency preparedness exercises in the response to a mass casualty terrorist incident. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 46.
Tannenbaum, S.I. & Cerasoli, C.P. (2013). Do team and individual debriefs enhance performance? A meta-analysis. Human Factors, 55(1), 231–245.
Keiser, N.L. & Arthur, W. (2021). A meta-analysis of the effectiveness of the after-action review (or debrief) and factors that influence its effectiveness. Journal of Applied Psychology.

Written by the Crisis Dynamics team