Disaster Recovery Journal

George Sheehan, physician, author and running enthusiast once said “Exercise is done against one’s wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse” I think that quote seems to apply equally to the field of emergency management and business continuity. Everyone hates to perform exercises for a variety of reasons but do ever so reluctantly. This reluctance comes from either the anger from one more thing to do in an already compressed schedule or maybe from a fear of the unknown. Exercises shouldn’t be viewed that way. Exercises can be your friend and offer many advantages to an organization. This article will show that in certain clarity how exercises can help your program.

Some bosses ask why they have to conduct all these blasted exercises. They have long lists of why they shouldn’t do the exercise – money, time too short, the event will never happen, etc. Nowadays every business needs a continuity plan. And every plan needs to be exercised in order to be effective.

Everyone has stories about what exercises should and could be. One must look past the pain of the antidotal stories to what can be. Exercises can be great ways to test plans, technology, and people. They also can be great ways to enhance operations. Great ideas tend to spring up in the heat of the moment. That passion sparks innovation like few other things in the average world. The last great advantage of exercise is what they can bring to your group in the area of training. Training of personnel is always hard. It seems harder now in times of tight budgets and other challenges. People are reading less and demanding any communications media is entertaining over anything else. How does one train with that mandate? Exercises can help with that problem.

Everyone has good war stories about exercises. The organizer missed a meeting and was thrown into the task with little or no training. The event seemed to drone on with no apparent purpose, taking away valuable time from the work day. The other sides of the stories evolve around how the expert tries to script events and players like props in a move. Every detail in the exercise was spelled out in intimate detail weeks in advance. Everyone just parrots the script like dogs on parade. Those exercises don’t really prepare groups either. That all way makes good stories but bears little relation to reality. Exercises can be much more than that. If they are crafted well, relevant, and allow free play organizations may find them the best thing going for them on many different fronts.

Testing is always a much feared thing. I think it all goes back to school. Everyone to one degree or another experienced some degree test anxiety or trauma from those results. That anxiety doesn’t stop with exercises. It just drums up those past experiences in everyone’s minds. Participants start stuttering, people start sweating, and occasionally vomit flies when the emergency guy kicks off the exercise.

This anxiety does not take away the great need to conduct some sort of exercise of plans and for that fact the exercising of people. There is no other way to accurately see if the intent on paper matches reality. Frequently plans miss important details. The missing factors frequently lie in the seams. Factors, programs or people that rely on inter-relationships are frequently the things plans forget. An example of what I am talking about is gas for vehicles, mechanics or wreckers for broke vehicles are the things that written plans forget. Those things don’t show up at a fast read. They only show up in the context of doing the act.

All too often people, manufactures and users tend to believe what the marketing department puts out in the commercial or on the pamphlet. They say item X can do this or that. The item can start the car in the morning, fly around the block, read the neighbors paper, make coffee and 20 other tasks on a tank of gas. You will never know if the wild claims the manufacture states their reputation on are true until you take it out of the warehouse and see if it does what it claims. Then the issue of integration comes into play. Nothing works in a vacuum. Your device will support someone. It will need someone to support it like to put gas in it. You will never figure out those relationships until you test it in an exercise.

Exercises also test training knowledge. Training all too often is hap hazard at best. People don’t get any training or get the right kind of training respective to their role in the plan. They also might think they are doing task A because that is what they did 15 years ago. However the organization has changed its mission or equipment list in those 15 years. There might not be a need for task A to be performed. That oversight will normally not come up outside of an exercise when the person starts doing the obsolete task.

A lot of money every year is spent trying to build innovation. There are always the usual research and development expenditures for technology. There is also a huge need for raw idea generation. Corporations rack their brains on how that gets done. While they are trying to generate ideas the usual pace of the day marches on. There are customers to tend too, papers to file, bills to pay, etc. The constant barrage of that leaves little time for innovation. Of course there are the touchy feely escapes to the woods for a day. Some million dollar consultant stands up and has you carve pumpkins or something as a way to get in touch with your creative side, even if you make cars and have nothing to do with agriculture. Common sense tells you that might not work to well.

Exercises offer a creative way to get straight to the point of idea generation. If exercises are done right they immerse people in an alternate reality. This alternate reality reflects what the corporation does with a twist. The twist is how the future might change. Then the people have to respond, analysis the environment, come up with courses of action then execute as much as possible. The courses of action that come out from that are usually quite different than what they see in normal day to day activities. People also learn new skills like better idea generation in the exercise.

Many develop new plans or technology that comes from these exercises. Shell Oil has been real successful at this. They put their senior leadership in a room way from the normal day to day pressures. Then they tell the leadership that the world has changed this way. What will the company do in response? The options generated from these exercises or discussions have helped shaped plans and future operations. We at GSA and at the military have also generated plan options from such exercise play.

The big $64,000 question for continuity specialists is how to do train your staff. The old way was to throw a book at the participant and say read this by such and such date. Of course the plan is like 300 pages and the specialist has to do their normal duties in addition to read the event. Reading probably uses to be enough in the old days to get the job done. Plans were simpler and people read more.

Nowadays people get information differently than in the past. More and more people don’t get information from reading. One National Endowment of the Arts poll in 2002 found out that only 57 percent of Americans read one book last year. Another AP poll in 2007 found out that 25 percent of Americans did not read any book last year. A successful book nowadays means you make the New York Times best sellers list. That means you sell more than 100,000 books in a nation of more than 300 million. People are turning to Google to get that information. Unless you have a business in the print industry you stand a good chance you will have a work force that hasn’t read that latest New York Times best seller.

Exercises can help fill that void. They can become the best vehicle to train your work force on top of assessing your capability. The live animated nature of most exercises jazzes people up. Their cognitive lob in their brains is turned on full blast. The exercise becomes the best means to reach the adult worker.

Reaching adults is far different than adolescents. Adults learn differently. To reach those people trainers have to be different. Learning has to be fun and active. The teacher is just one of many in the group. All people of the group contribute, all learn from the process. These principles are part of adult learning. These ideas follow the principles laid out by David Kolb in the late 40s. His theory says that adults learn differently than kids. There are four phases to this cycle of learning, immediate concrete experience, reflective observations, abstract conceptualization and active experimentation. The exercise is a method you can reach adults in all four parts of that process.

Your concrete experience is an attention grabber. It puts the learner into the realm. You could say it like turns on the brain. Your concrete experience could be the special theatrics of an exercise. It grabs the person and puts them in the thought realm relating to the plan. The concrete experience opens heir mind so they absorb material faster than they normally would.

Basing your exercise in reality and on your organizational principles as they truly are puts the person while they are playing in the reflective observation realm. It gets them thinking deeply about the subject. They exercise needs to dive into the weeds at this point. The deep recesses of the plan needs to be worked into the middle of the exercise or into answers. The play pushes the material from the page into the player’s mind.

The “what if” part of the exercise pushes the person into the abstract concept part of the process. It is probably the most important part of the process. You need to push them from the immediacy of the moment to the what are we going to do if the sky starts following. You would do this towards the end of the exercise. Another way of doing this is to push people to generate courses of action back relating to the exercise problem. The act of generating these are we going to do steps pushes them to move thought off of what they know to what they don’t know.

The last part of active experimentation is meant by forcing people to do what you talk about. You need to try to get them to do something. The action sort of hard writes it into their brain. That best improves your chances to ensure long term remembering of the material. There is definitely something magical about doing. It locks the material in there.

Today’s newspaper and most likely tomorrows will involve some disaster in the world. The question is how your organization will react in response. Will it, or can it afford to watch it on TV? Will it respond but respond with such horror it would have been better if everyone stayed home and watched it on TV. Overall exercises are not to be feared and are your friend. They could be your magic key to ensure survivability though the next disaster.

Thomas M. Magee is the continuity program manager for GSA, Public Buildings Service in Kansas City. Magee has been running both large and small continuity exercises for GSA in a variety of circumstances. He has also assisted in the FEMA/Federal Executive Board continuity exercises involving multiple agencies and hundreds of people. On the weekend, Magee works as an Army Reserve Lt. Colonel with expertise in training and running exercises.