Preparing a communal crisis management exercise

During major events, whether industrial or natural in origin, institutional or private organizations are called upon to activate their crisis management plans, if they exist. Organizational difficulties can sometimes arise, impairing the ability to manage a crisis, and even amplifying its consequences.

Since the occurrence of crises is, by definition, low, it's not easy to build up experience and be better prepared to deal with them. This is where crisis management training comes in. From theoretical training to full-scale exercises, organizations can improve and test their knowledge, know-how and interpersonal skills. In this learning path, the crisis management exercise offers an interesting "educational value/cost" ratio for working on an organization-wide scale.

Despite existing preparation guides, a number of difficulties remain:

• a lack of credibility and interactivity, which in most cases can be observed in today's crisis management exercises. They detract from the exercise's pedagogical impact, and make it impossible to achieve the objectives defined in advance;

• it can be difficult for the person in charge of organizing a scheduled crisis management exercise to appreciate the impact of a particular pedagogical choice. Some keys to understanding need to be explained;

• the production of exercise documents is very time-consuming. It is important to precisely identify all the media involved in the organization and execution of the exercise.

The aim of this article is to facilitate the preparation of a pedagogical crisis management exercise. We define "non-pedagogical" exercises as those intended to demonstrate, where the aim is not to improve the functioning of an organization or a device, but to show the population that crisis decision-makers are training. This case study is based on the municipal level. The development of a scenario and animation tools will be discussed. The tools and methods proposed in this article are based on research carried out by the authors over several years, and capitalize on their experience based in particular on the total execution of 21 exercises (in simulator and in situ).