How to Involve Executives in Your Exercise Program

“What’s the point!” exclaimed one executive in the back of the room. “This is stupid!” exclaimed another, throwing up his hands in frustration.

Such is the summary judgment from executive participants during a business continuity exercise gone awry.

These were not the critiques designers had expected when they first began this project. They had envisioned an exercise for the executive team, to help them learn their roles and responsibilities and to motivate them to become strong supporters of the overall BC program.

In recent years, executives have increasingly embraced the idea of personal involvement in testing their BC programs. For the BC professional, a well-designed exercise program provides excellent opportunities for exposure to top executives while helping them make strategic decisions about the future of business continuity in their organizations. Here are some ideas about executive involvement that are important to remember.

Recruiting an Executive Sponsor.
Every exercise program needs an executive sponsor. Who will make the best one for your organization? Many business continuity programs are part of the IT department while others are part of Administration, Operations, Finance, HR, Facilities, or Security. Rather than looking for a specific title as a sponsor, it is often more productive to consider which executives in your organization have actually experienced a disaster. An executive who has been through a disaster will see the need for a well-exercised BC program more passionately than one who has not. When selecting an executive sponsor, passion and position are equally important.

Engaging An Executive Sponsor.
When designing exercises, executive sponsors are often engaged too early or too late. The ideal time to engage your executive sponsor is early in the design process, but not before you have created the exercise scope, purpose, and objectives, and have determined the resources you will need to design and facilitate the event. If all of these details are in good order, you are likely to end the discussion with a clear directive to proceed. Set the date far enough in advance, and ask top management to send a directive for all to attend.

Incremental Realism.
Any exercise program should be designed incrementally to become more realistic over time, ultimately providing participants with an exercise that simulates a real event. In the beginning, some executives may be naïve, having very vague notions about what really happens when a disaster occurs. To help them improve, they need concepts initially, but soon after, they will be eager to test their abilities in a simulation.

Orientations.
An orientation is an educational session used to introduce new plans or to engage new staff or leadership. Many don’t think of an orientation as an exercise at all, but if you have a new plan, or if you have an executive team that has never been tested, you can properly set their expectations about testing by providing an initial orientation. You can create a set of PowerPoint slides to show them what is in the plan and who is involved. This tool is a “must” for executives who may want to support your program, but really don’t understand the program’s components, and how they fit together. Walking your executive team through an overview of the program is an excellent way to prepare them for what they will experience in a simulation.

Tabletops have traditionally been the exercise of choice in the private sector because they are useful in a broad range of situations and because they are relatively inexpensive to design. If your goal is to encourage cooperation among executives who have not been tested together before, a tabletop is a good option, and a good time to give them their first tabletop is immediately after they have received their initial orientation. The beauty of a tabletop is that your executives will discover their responsibilities by listening to others as everyone explains their roles in an environment that is relatively non-stressful.

To keep an executive tabletop effective, the facilitator must be ready to keep things moving because participants will be motivated to immediately resolve the issues they uncover. In these circumstances, the facilitator’s role is to “board” the issue, knowing that a much better resolution may be found later when all of the right people are involved and everyone is focused on the same objective. To reduce the impact of “ad-libs,” it is helpful to have participants refer to their actual plans as they respond, and have them note what is missing for follow-up.

A useful augmentation to a tabletop exercise is to add breakout sessions during which the larger group is divided into smaller teams which are asked to brainstorm how key activities will be performed. This is particularly effective with executive teams to make them aware of their own roles versus the roles that others will play in a real disaster.

Tabletops can be made more realistic by adding simulated elements as part of the opening narrative or to signal shifts of time or location. These simulated elements can be still photos, simulated newscasts, or simply audio recordings. Having certain participants read update statements, or handing out a list of injured during the tabletop can bring a higher sense of reality and keep participants focused on the event.

Evacuation Drills.
Higher level executives often refuse to participate in evacuation drills. This lack of participation can be extremely destructive to your overall program because nothing will send the wrong message to the organization quicker than an executive team that doesn’t value drills. If this is your situation, make it a priority to renovate this aspect of your exercise program. Begin by asking your executive sponsor to send out a reminder stating that participation in the evacuation drill is mandatory. With a focus on life safety instead of speed, you can make evacuation drills more engaging by positioning balloons or teddy bears at various locations to simulate stranded employees or visitors. In later drills, the simulated victims can be real humans holding signs describing their injuries, or moulaged victims.

Functional Exercises.
This exercise type simulates the expected environment at the time of a disaster. A functional exercise will allow your executives to experience the tension, frustrations, and challenges they will face in a real disaster. It will also give them practice using emergency communications devices and tracking tools. In most cases, disasters bring together executives from multiple disciplines, so practicing in advance how to work together is key to functioning effectively during a real event. Functional exercises are helpful in identifying glitches in communication flows between executive teams such as in an EOC environment or supply chain operation.

Full-Scale Exercises.
For the private sector, this exercise type is usually impractical as it would be too disruptive to the business, but a full-scale exercise sponsored by a municipality is a great opportunity for everyone in the area to improve their BC plans. Executives in the public sector should involve business executives in the area, and invite them as observers, if nothing more. With collaboration between private and public sector organizations, executives from both sides learn more about each other’s plans, and more realism is injected into the region’s response capability.

Incremental Improvement.
What executives appreciate most about well-managed exercise programs is evidence that incremental improvements are occurring. This is where your program needs rock-solid methodology-to make sure that all issues from an exercise are captured, to make sure that each issue is assigned to the best team to define and implement an improvement, and to make sure that these so-called improvements are re-tested in a future exercise. These steps send an important message to executives that your testing program is continuously adding value to your organization’s resiliency.

Attributes of an Exercise Program.
An exercise is not just another project on someone’s to-do list. It should be considered part of a program which is managed like the other programs that are embedded in your organization’s culture. It has a program manager. It has annual goals and objectives. It has an annual budget to achieve those objectives and the means to determine if each objective has been reached. It has an established protocol for delegating tasks across the organization. It has an incentive program to reward participants who meet or exceed their objectives. Finally, it has a report card system that allows executives to monitor progress as it occurs and to identify and reward the top performers.

About the Authors
Judy Bell is the founder and CEO of Disaster Survival Planning Network (DSPN). She is a Certified Emergency Manager (CEM). At Pacific Bell, she managed 2,400 employees in southern California, and was EOC chair during the network restoration following the Whittier earthquake in 1987. She authored the first book on business continuity for the private sector, Disaster Survival Planning: A Practical Guide for Businesses. Judy can be reached at [email protected].

Paul Klier is Vice President of DSPN. Prior to joining DSPN in 2002, he spent 24 years in high technology with firms such as Intel, Hewlett Packard and Texas Instruments and managed software programs that simulated scheduling emergencies in the airline industry. He manages DSPN’s workshop program, which has provided disaster simulations and disaster preparedness training to more than 3000 BC professionals. Paul’s email is [email protected].