Designing an exercise leadership will take seriously

The scenario is generic, so nobody recognizes their own operations in it. The injects are too gentle, so the team resolves everything in twenty minutes and concludes it is well prepared. Or the facilitator protects the participants from discomfort, and the exercise becomes a briefing with extra steps.

Three things a useful exercise does

It uses your actual critical services and named dependencies. It forces a decision under incomplete information — including at least one decision the group would prefer to escalate but cannot. And it holds the room long enough for the second-order consequences to arrive.

That third point is the one most often skipped for time. The interesting failures rarely show up in the first response; they show up ninety minutes later, when the workaround adopted at the start turns out to depend on the system that is still down.

The measure of success is not that the team performed well. It is that the team left with a short list of things it intends to change.

On facilitation

The facilitator’s job is not to make the session comfortable. It is to keep it honest and keep it moving. That means naming an unresolved disagreement rather than smoothing it over, and resisting the urge to answer a question the group should be answering itself.

It also means being willing to let a silence sit. When nobody in the room can say who has authority to make a particular call, that silence is the finding.