Sophia Klewer: [00:00:00] It's really crucial to incorporate cascading events and interdependencies into your scenario design because it's just reflecting real world scenarios. But what I think is important to use an approach of what I call controlled complexity. So you don't just add in as much complexity and as many events as you can, just for the sake of adding them in and making people aware of them, you have to think about what is the learning benefit of introducing a certain event.
Kyle King: Hi, and welcome to the Crisis Lab Podcast. I'm your host, Kyle. And today we're discussing one of the most crucial aspects of organizational preparedness. Crisis simulations. Now that the unexpected seems to be the new normal, whether it's cyber attack, a global pandemic, or the ongoing world wars in several parts of the world, organizations need more than just [00:01:00] plans on paper.
They need to stress test their systems, decisions, and teams in realistic high pressure scenarios. And that's where crisis simulations come in. So today we're exploring how these exercises help organizations not only survive, but adapt and thrive in the face of adversity. With the rapid evolution of crises.
From climate disasters to geopolitical instability, the ability to quickly react and make informed decisions under pressure has never been more important. So joining us today is Sophia Klewer, the Chief Operating Officer at Provinci and an expert with extensive experience in developing and running crisis exercises across multiple sectors, including government, military and private industry.
Sophia is here to unpack the real value of these simulations, how they go beyond theory to prepare for organizations for the complexities you face. Of real world crises. So Sophia, welcome to the show.
Sophia Klewer: Thanks for having me.
Kyle King: So just as a way of a quick introduction, maybe you could tell us just a little bit about your background and where you started and where you are today.
Sophia Klewer: Yeah, of course [00:02:00] I started, or I have a background in. Actually media and communications and started working out in marketing and journalism. And I feel a lot of crisis management thoughts come from the communications line of work. So I started out working in media and communications and then by chance, actually joined a prevency where I work today, I don't know, five, six years back.
And what we focus on is crisis exercises and simulation supported by your own software solution. So what my job includes is everything from designing, facilitating, assessing crisis exercises with clients from government, industry, but also military, and to help them bring their exercises to life.
Kyle King: I, thanks for that quick introduction.
I know that probably just. Introduces you to a wide spectrum of different clients and things like that. So a number of different sectors, as you mentioned, military government, and of course, the private sector. And of course, all these sectors [00:03:00] are different in their approach to crisis simulations and exercises.
And so what do you see, I think is a first great sort of question to get started with is what do you see in terms of cross sectorial lessons that you see that are common themes across all these different dynamics and different sort of organizations?
Sophia Klewer: Yeah. So I think each sector approaches our crisis training differently.
Of course, government agencies, they have more comprehensive trainings, usually corporates or industry. They do deep dives on certain topics, and then military is really detailed and large scale exercises. But in terms of learning outcomes, what I often see is that. Most of them struggle with the same issues, which is, for example, situational awareness.
So be it governmental agencies, crisis management teams within corporates or the military, what they all have in common to get all the information they need and then structured and visualize it in a way that they can use [00:04:00] it, that they can produce intelligence out of it and share that with all the stakeholders involved, and then also communication.
And cross departmental coordination are two things that all of these struggle with. And I feel like that they could learn a lot from each other. So I think corporates, for example, could learn a lot from military or government in terms of how decisions are made or how to build trust within teams. And then on the other hand, the military could learn a lot from industry on being more agile and maybe.
adapting technology faster for the crisis management. So they are similar in some respects and then they differ in others, but I think it would be a really great idea to bring those together and have them learn from each other. And that happens not enough in my opinion, because everyone's keeping it to themselves.
Kyle King: Yeah, that's a very interesting perspective. I expected that [00:05:00] it's the sort of coordination and cross communication piece, but yes, that's what we encounter. And our sort of daily work and the things that we do with our international programs is really just, it feels like it's always coming down to interdepartmental or interagency communication and coordination.
That is like the root cause of most things. I wanted to ask you then, since you mentioned that, in your experience, is situational awareness, or is it the interdepartmental or interagency communication, Which one contributes to what? Is it the communication that is undermining situational awareness in this case?
Sophia Klewer: So I think they really go hand in hand because on the one hand, you need information from the different departments or the different stakeholders you are engaging with to have a clear picture of your situation. And then again, you need to share that picture with different actors and different stakeholders.
And. It often is down to not getting the information at the right pace. So it's really [00:06:00] slow, especially if you have 2 agencies that have to share information, or if you have each sector, like organizations from each sector within 1 exercise, and they have to share information with each other. It can get really complicated and then making a situational picture out of that, that is, I think, a really challenging task, especially that's what I see a lot in, like, across sectors, because they are not that many tools for that incorporated in the teams.
So usually. They just have a flip chart and they write something down and then they notice, Oh, that's not good. And then they just throw it all out and go with the flow. So there's no structured approach to that. How to, on the one hand, engage with each other, share information, and then put that all into one comprehensive picture to have as a foundation for your crisis management.
And I think that's really a problem. And I also see that in. A lot of exercises because each sector keeps it to itself. There's not enough [00:07:00] training where organizations from all three sectors are training together. Usually when you have military exercises, you have actors within military training together.
If you have the. Corporate exercises, you just have people from that one organization training together. But usually because crisis are not isolated situations, you would have to engage or bring together all those different stakeholders training together and especially training, communicating with each other.
And I think that is not done often enough. I
Kyle King: would completely agree with that. And I think that there's two elements I would pick up on from what you just said. One is the ability to not only just share information, but to compile it. And turn it into a tangible product. And so just the vast amount of information you can get from all the different stakeholders.
Sometimes you don't even know what to do with it, the information they give you. And so that can be extremely complicated in terms of, you know, distilling that information into a useful product that informs your situational awareness. And the second thing is, especially in terms of the military, at least my [00:08:00] opinion is that there's a high need to exercise and to ensure that you have a certain readiness level because the performance requirements are obviously very high and need to be there for certain reasons.
And it's difficult to get that cross sectoral cooperation, and especially in exercises like you're talking about. I think there's a genuine interest, but there's also a bandwidth issue. Uh, we already have X hundred of hours of training every year, and we only have so much time that we can actually. Look at these broader issues and it's a challenge that we're seeing now in terms of trying to have these broader conversations about what a national resilience or societal resilience mean to the military.
There's a genuine interest, but also a capacity within an organization to understand and participate. And all these different exercises. And I think it's something that has to be addressed longer term, but there's such a high training requirements. It's often difficult to try and integrate these things.
Have you seen any unique approaches towards how organizations with high training requirements can possibly broaden their [00:09:00] perspective or integrate these topics like you're talking about?
Sophia Klewer: So I think resources is one really major point here. As you're hinting also, they have these high training requirements, but they also need to have the resources, be it financial budgets, but also human resources to support them.
Prepare, organize, conduct the, the exercises. And I know, for example, in Germany, we have this nationwide crisis exercise, which happens, I think, every four years or something like that. And that is really a nice example because it brings together governmental agencies. I don't know if military is, uh, involved in that, but different organizations.
But as you can see from, it takes place every four years. And I think last year, I don't know if it even took place. It's a lot of effort and there's like whole teams just working on that one exercise, recognizing the importance of training together, and then Providing the resources is really important and maybe also it doesn't always have to be if you have high [00:10:00] training requirements and you spend a lot of time training, you don't need to add large scale exercises to your training plan.
Sometimes it already makes sense to come together with the different organizations. And talk about stuff or have a tabletop exercise that only runs for a couple of hours, maybe two hours that doesn't need as much preparation time and time to facilitate, but just to share perspectives and create a common sense of each other's perspectives and issues and what to deal with in such a situation also makes a lot of sense.
Kyle King: I would agree with that. I think that there's a value in at least starting to slowly introduce these topics or introduce the interagency cooperation, especially across that civ mil divide, not just in the classical sense of civil military cooperation and quote unquote, civil defense, then all these sort of outdated might be a strong word, but let's say the sort of previous thinking.
And I think as we move into more complex environments these days, there's a need to start having these [00:11:00] conversations, as you mentioned. To start introducing these topics to seeing how we can work together, because it's very clear information requirements that everybody has. So, and there's real value of just simply sitting around the table, like you're talking about.
But there's also, we've encountered in our work that many times, even though you try to do these baby steps to try and build upon something, you do get some pushback from participants, especially if they start to feel overwhelmed. By the topics, if you take the military out into a discussion and we start talking about food and water security and other aspects there, there's obviously an interest because it affects them as well, but there's also this barrier to where it's, that's not necessarily our responsibility.
You can get a bit of a pushback to a certain extent. So do you ever encounter this type of pushback from participants who might feel overwhelmed or may not feel that they're responsible for the topics that you're talking about
Sophia Klewer: on a regular basis? Actually with different crisis [00:12:00] exercises at any level within an organization.
It can be senior level staff, but could also be first responders and so on. And what I have noticed that pushbacks typically come from a place of. Feeling frustrated or unprepared or not performing as you wanted to perform in the situation, or I have this feeling of, I have so much on my plate, I just don't want to have this additional task on my plate as well.
And what matters to me is, especially as person facilitating an exercise to take this in as a learning moment or teachable moment and remind the participants that. Real crises don't follow a script. They can be frustrating and they can task that are not responsible for, but you will have to take on those tasks in an emergency situation and really talk to them how they could do that and make clear what the exercise objectives.
So it's up to. effective [00:13:00] facilitation of the exercise. Also, another reason behind those pushbacks, at least in my experience, is if you push it too far with your exercise. For example, at the beginning of your exercise, you might want to confront your participants with incomplete information. need some kind of information, but you just don't give it to them.
If you push that too far, you don't provide the information to them for too long. Of course, they will get frustrated because they cannot do the work that they want to do. So you have to be really careful about such things and read the room, how everyone is doing, and even if it's unrealistic, just for the sake of the learning outcome for the exercise.
Provide that information to your participants, for example, or maybe not stress them so much as you're doing. So you really always have to look for and aim for a productive learning environment, and that might mean that your scenario or [00:14:00] your exercise will be more productive. Less realistic, or you will have to go off script and have a quick coaching session or talk to people.
But pushbacks typical for crisis exercises, I would say.
Kyle King: Hey there, just a quick pause in our show for a second. Did you know that most of our guests on the Crisis Lab podcast have courses inside of Crisis Lab? So if you're finding value in these conversations or they pique your interest and you want to dive deeper into this topic, just head over to crisislab.
io for more information. Our courses, Webinars and resources are designed to equip professionals like you with the knowledge needed to navigate complex and changing environments. We recognize that your time matters, so everything we do is accredited. Don't forget to subscribe and join our community of over 18, 000 professionals who follow Crisis Lab.
And are committed to enhancing preparedness and strategic thinking because at Crisis Lab we believe in empowering you with cross domain knowledge and blended with international perspectives, ultimately making you better every day. Now let's get back to the show. There's also this aspect [00:15:00] of cascading events or even as the environment changes, we see more complex events and sort of more complex environments and we see cascading events and we try to integrate these into our exercises.
If they're getting frustrated and you're not addressing it during the simulation or the exercise. And then you start getting into cascading events. It only compounds the problem as you start going through, because then if they were already frustrated, and then you're five different layers into complexity, that's only going to make it worse in terms of their participation.
And so how are you trying to manage participation or ensure participants can manage these sort of multiple interrelated challenges? Especially in an environment where we have to introduce these now, right? And so we have to bring these up. We saw this with the pandemic and it was not only a health crisis, but it's a supply chain crisis, or if we see even just the most two recent hurricanes in the United States that were back to back, it's power, it's water, it's food, it's transportation, it's infrastructure, it's everything.
And so [00:16:00] how can we manage that participation as things become more complex, cascading events and more overwhelming for the participants?
Sophia Klewer: Yeah, so I think, first of all, as you said, it's really crucial to incorporate cascading events and interdependencies into your scenario design, because it's just reflecting real world scenarios.
But. What I think is important to use an approach of what I call controlled complexity, so you don't just add in as much complexity and as many events as you can, just for the sake of adding them in and making people aware of them. You have to think about what is the learning benefit of introducing a certain event.
So. If you want to make people aware that a hurricane could cause water outages, power outages, and so on, it might be enough to have those two, even though there's maybe also traffic and infrastructure and so on, [00:17:00] because it will already trigger critical thinking of the longer term impacts and chain reactions an initial situation might have.
And then what's also a nice method, I think, to keep people engaged is to incorporate positive feedback and positive news. What we tend to do in our crisis exercises is to map out those worst case scenarios and then make them go worse and worse over time and not have one positive news for the participants.
But what I have noticed in my work is when you just give them a little bit, so for example, they have the task to evacuate a building. And at the beginning of the exercise, there's three people missing, and they don't know what's up with those, uh, three people. And then over the course of the exercise, you let them know, hey, person one, he has appeared, he's happy and healthy, he was not in the building, it's all good.
They will keep being engaged in the exercise because they get positive news and they get positive feedback and it's not just all [00:18:00] dooming and negative. So that's also a nice method to introduce cascading events, different types of crises into a scenario and still keep people engaged and have them learn from the situation without being completely overwhelmed by the situation.
Kyle King: I think that's important and maybe I just don't recall it, it probably happened because you achieve objectives in an exercise. So I'd say, yes, largely it happens, but yeah, it's really interesting. We focus on the negative and responding to a catastrophic incident, but we don't really ever focus on how you actually achieved your objective and you stabilized an incident and emphasizing the positive aspect as much as we do.
The sky is falling collapse of the world scenario that we're training in. So that's a really, I think. an important point that we lose track of over time. But I'd like to shift gears a little bit in terms of technology because you're working obviously with crisis simulation software and obviously you're involved in the technology space in terms of what organizations are [00:19:00] working with and how they're preparing for a crisis.
What are the limitations on the use of technology and sort of the misconceptions that come along with that use of technology, especially maybe if you're Let's say a very forward leaning type of organization and you want technology all over the place and you're going to throw AI into everything you're doing and really go all into tech.
What is your sort of feeling about the environment we're in these days?
Sophia Klewer: I think a lot is changing. Crisis exercises are changing due to technology. A lot of the exercises that were tabletop exercises before, just discussion based, are now real time simulations supported by technology like VR. And that is great because Especially for my job, when designing and facilitating exercises, this technology can help with creating realistic scenarios.
It can help with doing the research and even with facilitation on the fly, but then there are also some limitations and misconceptions. So [00:20:00] what I often experience is that clients come to me. And ask for a tool that will just automate everything. So from the first step, designing your training to facilitating, and then also assessing the training audience's performance, they just want to hit one button and the software does it for them.
And I have not encountered one tool that can do that. If there ever will be, that is. Great, but I don't see that in the near future. Let's put it that way, especially when it comes to running the exercises and assessing the training audience's performance. AI is great for analyzing vast amounts of data and information.
So that's great. But a lot of training is on human behavior, on team dynamics, leadership, and so on. So I think Just using technology won't do the job. You have to do smart combination of both the human in the loop and the technology as a support tool.
Kyle King: I think we're largely saying about the [00:21:00] same thing and the use of tech sort of tool, like large language models, they can make your work go faster, but they can't necessarily replace a lot of things, especially there's still some high dependencies there.
If the power goes out and there's no internet, you still are stuck in the same place. And you have to have the process and the knowledge and the ability to. Bit of a whiteboard and sheets of paper and having the same process, but the manually, and so there's some real skillsets that are still very much needed that can be replaced.
You had mentioned different training audiences and leadership and things like that. So how do you approach exercises differently from say the frontline first responder versus the senior leaders that are on the leadership team? And how are senior leaders really tested during these types of simulations?
Sophia Klewer: Yeah, I think what that comes down to really is scenario design and how your exercise is set up because you have to design exercises differently based on who you train with. So if you train with first responders, it will be really focused on operational tasks. Your scenario might not be as [00:22:00] complex, but it will have a lot of Smaller issues that the participants need to take on immediately.
And then when you train with senior staff, of course, it's more about high level decision making. And most of the time, senior leaders are really experienced in what they're doing. They have a lot of domain knowledge, but they also have leadership knowledge. Your scenario has to be challenging and complex enough to train that with them.
Also things like prioritizing or communicating with teams within the organization. So it is different in terms of designing the exercise and the learning objectives of the exercise and the topics to focus on. So while first responders might focus on the safety of the employees or public safety, high level leadership.
Might protect reputation or other assets. It's a bit more tricky to train senior level staff. Also coming back to the pushback [00:23:00] topic, I feel that most of the time senior level staff more likely to push back on scenarios or fight the scenarios we come up with. And especially in situations where the senior staff trains together with their teams, because then they feel like they would have to perform in front of their team.
Here it's also really important to make clear that the exercise is about learning together, it's not about testing individual performance, and it is human to make mistakes and learning by productive failures. Yeah, but it's a bit more challenging, I would say, to train senior leaders.
Kyle King: Senior leaders do really, I think, approach the situation differently than of course their staff do or the organizations below them do.
And I think that's something that is an, that's a value add, but also can be, as you mentioned, difficult to exercise. And there's a bit of an art, I guess, an art and a science into designing sort of the simulation or crisis exercises, because you have senior leadership, which may be taking role, which may not be taking [00:24:00] roles, how you can leverage them, but also leveraging their teams and their support staff and everything else.
In the organization and the longer the simulation goes on, we need to strike a balance because there's a bit of a decision fatigue that occurs. And so how do you find the right balance between that? So, you know, the longer the exercise goes, the more sort of decision fatigue you have. And at the same time, you need a simulation to rise to the level, be prolonged enough to draw in senior leadership.
So that means that there's obviously a time bound, it's scale, it's complexity bound. And so how do you tend to simulate the sort of the mental and or emotional pressures that senior leaders might face in these types of crisis? But as I mentioned, there's a major art to it because you can't just keep going on an exercise forever.
So how do you integrate these two things or these three things?
Sophia Klewer: Yeah. So it's important to simulate pressure. And of course you can run a really. Long duration exercise. I am personally not a [00:25:00] fan of that. I think after 6 hours of continuously exercising, the learning curve just goes downwards and you can simulate those pressures and decision fatigue and so on using different approaches, making the scenario really complex and.
multi layered and have your senior leaders make decisions early on in the scenario and also confront them with ethical dilemmas or emotional decisions or injects from simulated teams or staff confronting them with really emotional issues. And then also overwhelm them a little bit with the decisions they have to make and see if they are able to prioritize what to do first, what to delegate and so on.
So, not a. Huge fan of doing really long trainings. And of course, at some point you have to stop. And especially with senior leaders, they are happy and they're more engaged if the exercise is shorter because their schedules are usually really packed. But by designing [00:26:00] complex, multi layered scenarios that incorporate different challenges, like ethical dilemmas, high stakes decisions, maybe also conflicting priorities, stuff like that.
And the test, how well they maintain composure and clarity and how they communicate. And I think what's important here is also to add in elements of direct feedback, especially with senior staff. So if they take a decision, they have to see the consequences of that decision. And if the decision was made in a rush or because they have been training for quite a while and have reduced focus, they are exhausted and they just don't Have poor judgment at that point of time, you need to make them aware of that, because that's also something that you want to train in those exercises for them to.
know when they have reached this specific point and then take a step back and say, okay, I'm not making decisions based on facts, you know, really aware like I was before. So maybe I have to do some self [00:27:00] care or I have to have my deputy stand in for me at that point of time. But you want to push senior leaders to do that.
That point, of course, always with them considering mental health and being and so on, but this is an issue in real crisis situation. So you want to bring them to that point where they really experience. Decision fatigue and exhaustion while still having to perform.
Kyle King: And that really does come down into the initial sort of design in terms of working with the organization and trying to understand what they want to achieve, what are the objectives that they have and things like that.
So what are the common misperceptions that organizations have when they first approach you to design an exercise? Sometimes I've seen it myself where. It's everything. They want to test everything, right? And so the most catastrophic scenario possible. But, and there's other times when they just want to test enough to check the box, so to speak, in terms of being compliant.
So what do they often get wrong and about preparing for a crisis? And what are some of the [00:28:00] misconceptions that organizations often have when initially engage you and want to go through one of these simulations.
Sophia Klewer: Yeah. So I think you've mentioned already a couple, I agree with them. Maybe the biggest misconception I would say is that crisis exercises are a one off, you have a one off exercise and then you are prepared for the next X years.
In reality, crisis preparedness is an ongoing process. Exercising is an ongoing process. I often compare it to going to the gym, like your crisis management muscle. You have to train it to stay in shape and stay resilient, but that's often a misconception when clients come to us, they just want to do that one exercise, check it off their box, maybe get that ISO certification, and then they're good to go.
But that's not the case. Really, if you want to take this seriously, at least train once a year or every two years to stay in shape. And then another one, we've already talked about this, would be technology will do everything for [00:29:00] them. As I said, they will come to me and look for fully automated crisis exercises.
Again, if you explain that this is not possible, or at least you will not reach the objectives you have with this approach, it's also fine. And then another one I think is wanting to control everything. So most of the time you have someone from within the organization designing the scenario with you. And I think it's just natural that if you have never designed an exercise before that you want everything to be perfect and go.
As plan and you want to be in full control of everything, but that is just not the nature of crisis exercises. They're just highly unpredictable and they're really dynamic situations where you have to adapt. So having a script is great and you should have a script, but you cannot. Be overly reliant on that script and you have to plan for some flexibility and adapt to whatever is going on.
I think in [00:30:00] all the years I've been doing that now, I've never been. Part of a crisis exercise where everything was going to plan. And of course, if you're the person responsible in your organization for this project and you want to have a success, you might focus on that. But that's simply impossible, I would say, to be in control.
That much.
Kyle King: Hey there, just a quick pause in our show for a second. Did you know that most of our guests on the Crisis Lab podcast have courses inside of Crisis Lab? So if you're finding value in these conversations or they pique your interest and you want to dive deeper into this topic, just head over to crisislab.
io for more information. Our courses, webinars, and resources are designed to equip professionals like you with the knowledge needed to navigate complex And changing environments, we recognize that your time matters. So everything we do is accredited. Don't forget to subscribe and join our community of over 18, 000 professionals who follow crisis lab and are committed to enhancing preparedness and strategic thinking because the crisis lab, we believe in empowering you with cross domain knowledge and blended [00:31:00] with international perspectives, ultimately making you better every day.
Now let's get back to the show. And I, I think there's an element there too, building off of what you said. There's an element to being comfortable with letting people on your team or your staff go through the exercise and experience, experience the event and make decisions. Right. And so there's a sort of, it is control, but I think it's also a certain amount of confidence and to allow people to just learn from the experience.
Like you're not just going to stop and be like, that's the wrong decision. You shouldn't have done that. Allow people to make decisions, good or bad. I think is part of it.
Sophia Klewer: Yeah, exactly. And people will deal with the situation somehow and they will take away learnings from that. If you're really looking for exercises and training and not just checking the crisis exercise off in your checklist, then you should allow for that.
And also maybe to add to the previous question. One misconception also is that in order to be able to [00:32:00] do or participate in such a training, you have to have some experience or you have to have a perfect crisis management plan implemented already. Many exercises that I do are with teams who have never been in on a crisis management team before.
They have never been in a real crisis situation in their organization. I mean, often it's a starting point to actually start working on your crisis management plans on your procedures and so on. So you can train even without any kind of experience because crisis management is not a rocket science per se, but you have to gain that experience and you can only gain that through exercising.
So starting early on is a good way to do that.
Kyle King: Now, it would, how can I say this, we can't talk about simulations and exercises without talking about After Action Reviews. Now, I don't know, maybe a 50 50 split, but this is a love hate relationship with After Action Reviews. Either some people really like [00:33:00] them and they really like to go into great detail, And they like to really dive into why this happened or why this decision was made and what should we do about it.
And other people absolutely hate it. So they, it is, it's a, and of course there's people in the middle, but I think in my experience, most of all, people like either are into it really in the after action review, which is really nice, or they just are not, they're dismissive of the whole process and just want to get it over with.
But in terms of these. After action reviews, we have often the qualitative insights that we get from these events that may not be tied to specific objectives that might get missed. So how do we, we talked about designing, coming up with clear objectives and understanding our own training audience and all that stuff in the design phase and really setting some expectations.
Allowing people to make decisions. But what happens when you start to encounter things in an exercise, which are not necessarily tied to your objectives when you set [00:34:00] out on this whole process? How are you capturing them? What is your sort of experience and your advice and how we can best capture some of that data?
Sophia Klewer: Of course, you have to document that somehow. Most observers and also the role players will notice during the exercise if there is a lesson learned or at least some insights gained in the process because something is going really well or really bad. And then in the after action review, I think. First of all, you have to engage everyone.
I share your experience with some people loving it, some people hating it, but it is important trying to engaging also the people who hate it. And then first of all, have people reflect on their experience during the exercise. Give them the room to reflect and most of the time, of course, they will tell you what they have learned with respect to the exercise objectives, but they will also share what other things they have learned.
And then doing a deep dive into some of those things [00:35:00] could be important. And yeah, adapting your after action review a little bit to what you have experienced during the exercise is also important. Maybe you have set certain goals or KPIs or objectives, and they don't really fit any more in the end, and that's fine, reflect on why that happened, try to extract the most valuable lessons from the exercise, and these are often qualitative or behavioral observations, or maybe things you just weren't even aware of to begin with, you didn't know that this could be an issue, and taking that in, and improving that, Continuously using your after action review should be part of the process.
Kyle King: I think that there's in some ways that when people have after action reviews, that they often, it can be a bit uncomfortable. I guess I'll phrase it like that, especially if you're in a leadership position, because you might find that some of the things that were said or incorrect or not followed properly, [00:36:00] okay, there's process, there's SOPs, there's guidance, there's things like that.
But there might be some cultural aspects, organizational, cultural leadership aspects of where. Why didn't somebody bring this to my attention? Because they don't feel like there's a work culture to where they can are free to give recommendations or ask questions. Maybe it's a hostile work environment or whatever the case is.
So, there's these other aspects that I think are important to capture as to what you're talking about as well in terms of behavioral aspects, which are necessary if the organization really wants to improve. And some of it makes people uncomfortable at the end of the day.
Sophia Klewer: Yeah, definitely. And I think the best after action reviews happen when you have a culture where you can feedback openly and be really honest, but then as you said, you have other cultures as well.
As a facilitator of the after action review, it is important to Set the frame or moderate the after action review properly, really let people know that whatever during the after action review will stay [00:37:00] in that circle and that everyone feels comfortable to share their thoughts and that is not about finger pointing and that Maybe you can incorporate also some rules for giving feedback, and that might apply if you have a really hostile environment, that you have tools like giving feedback anonymously.
So people just writing down things, handing in the papers, and then You share what people have written down without attributing that to someone, and that might trigger a really honest discussion. I've seen that before, and at the end of the day, I think people will be thankful for receiving feedback because most of the time in those environments, many people share the same feeling, but nobody.
is sharing that, giving them the room and the opportunity to do that can be really great for moving forward and moving past those issues.
Kyle King: So we've talked a lot about sort of the overall process and the experiences of having [00:38:00] exercises and simulations at different organizations, but We have to look a little bit toward the future in terms of complex crisis.
And we know things are just getting more complicated every day in terms of how we deal with the impacts of a crisis and their second and third order effects that we may not see today, but are obviously there. We may be impacted by if something happens. So what do you think the future holds? What is your perspective when you're looking across this sort of space or this domain in terms of getting organizations prepared?
What direction do you think we're heading to? And what do you think there's some of the challenges in the future? I'll just leave it at that.
Sophia Klewer: Yeah. So I think as we discussed before, there will be a lot more technology in those exercises, which comes with benefits, but also challenges. So that's one point.
And then I think that we will see a change in scenarios as well, in terms of what we are training as a world becomes more, more diverse. Interconnected and systems are really [00:39:00] connected. Everything is a lot more technologically driven. I will play a bigger role, not only in supporting the whole exercise process, but also in terms of scenarios.
So I see that in my work already that especially clients from industry asking to train on scenarios where AI is the initial crisis. So maybe it's a data leak. Maybe it's some kind of misuse of AI, stuff like that. And most organizations at least are not prepared for that and how to handle that. As well as climate related risks, for example, I think at least in Germany, many organizations have not focused on those before, maybe governmental agencies, but not industry.
And that we see all those climate risks and crises happening here. Those will become threats that we will have a look at. And then the whole information sphere, I think it will play like communication, but also [00:40:00] stuff like disinformation campaigns, propaganda, information warfare, or hybrid threats will play a much bigger part in exercises, not only for military and governmental agencies.
But also in the industry, it really is like what it comes down to is technology and how the technology changes the process of designing exercises, running the exercises, but also the risks and scenarios we are training with in the future.
Kyle King: I would agree with a lot of that, especially on the sort of hybrid aspect of disinformation space.
We were seeing a lot of that at the time of this recording, that the compounding effects of the hurricanes in the United States with Milton and others. And so it was really. The misinformation and also disinformation that was coming out is pretty significant. And it really, in terms of really, how can I phrase this is really in terms of giving, let's just say a black eye, quote unquote, to, uh, as a federal merchant management agency in the United States.
And what I noticed from just many conversations is there's still [00:41:00] an old way of doing business in terms of press releases and videos and. Very sort of static slash bureaucratic response of, okay, we will release a public statement. And it doesn't, it no longer matches the speed of information is my feeling, right?
And which means that we have to be better at our communication tools and, or you can't really match the speed of viral videos on social media, but you can certainly try and meet it somewhere and get better at communication, more adaptable, more flexible. And things like that, as opposed to a standard sort of, here's our press release that comes out once a day or something like that.
So I think it's something that we have yet to see. And there's been a lot of sort of money and things like that spent internationally on hybrid warfare and sort of hybrid disinformation campaigns that we need to really take lessons from. In terms of our own sort of private sector or civil society approach, especially in terms of complex crisis, because where I think [00:42:00] we're seeing it now, I think it's only beginning becoming more of a problem and my sort of personal perspective.
Sophia Klewer: Yeah, I 100 percent agree with that. And to me, it feels like communicators within the different organizations will be some kind of frontline workers in the end, because they have to scan through all the social media traffic and all the news and misinformation, disinformation valid information flowing around and sort through the noise and then react to that in real time.
And that will be the challenge. And we see that corporates are doing a better job. And I think that's natural because they don't have the chains of command that public organizations often have for a good reason, of course. But as you said, I think we will have to make sure to. Meet the speed of information flowing around at some point of time and also adapt to the new means of communication.
And I [00:43:00] think many organizations are not prepared for that. It's not the press statement anymore. It's a video and you need someone to be part of that video and actually feel comfortable to. Talk to the camera and you have to define who is that person within the organization. Is it senior leader? Are you burning your management at what point of time?
And then also deal with the immediate feedback. And at least in the corporate world, what I see is that they take a lot from security agencies and from military incorporating methods like open source intelligence to gather the information and then. React to that in real time. So again, something where cross sectoral corporation could be really beneficial, at least in sharing experiences and tools and methods on how to do that.
Kyle King: Yeah, I completely agree. I think we have a lot to learn in terms of adapting what we've been dealing with on sort of the security space to our sort of civil society space for emergencies and crisis in the future. But [00:44:00] anyway, Sophia, thank you very much for joining us today on the Crisis Lab podcast and engaging in a discussion with us about the different aspects of crisis simulations and exercises and things like that.
It was very insightful. I really appreciate your time.
Sophia Klewer: Thank you for having me.
Kyle King: And that's all the time we have for today. Again, huge. Thanks to our guest, Sophia Cleaver for great discussion on how we design and execute crisis exercises. And to our listeners, thank you again for tuning in the crisis lab podcast.
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[00:45:00] Thanks for listening.
