5 Ways to Stress-Test Your Crisis Plan Before You Need It

Most companies have a crisis plan sitting in a binder, stored on a shared drive or tucked inside a business continuity folder somewhere. The plan probably looked solid when everyone approved it two years ago, but organizations now change faster than their plans can keep up: 

• Market conditions change.
• Business growth creates new exposure points.
• New customers and business partners introduce more risk.
• Leadership teams shift.
• Employees inherit plans they didn’t help build.

Executives live with these pressures every day, but when a real crisis hits, the whole team finds out fast whether that two-year-old plan still works. Or as boxer Mike Tyson famously put it, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face."

The live event sector understands this better than most. Every concert, festival, sporting event or conference relies on moving parts the audience never sees. Someone has to manage the crowds, weather, security, vendors, performers, equipment, transportation and emergency response, all while keeping the event safe and on schedule.

That leaves plenty of room for unexpected hits. One staffing gap, medical emergency, severe weather alert or security threat can upend months of planning fast. Darrell Henry, COO at Show Imaging, Inc., knows this all too well. The company manages live events and event production, where emergency action plans are often required. 

At Show Imaging, crisis planning isn’t just a risk exercise; it’s included in many of the firm’s client contracts. “For us, it’s not simply a box we have to tick for risk abatement or liability concerns,” Henry says. “Some of it is literally contractual.” This keeps crisis planning and plan testing on the front burner, but not all companies deal with that kind of external pressure.

“For most organizations, a crisis plan ends up being a paper tiger or an obligation they feel they have to do,” Henry explains. “It’s written down, created, tossed on a shared drive and never brought to the light of day again.” 

The plan also never gets stress-tested under real-world conditions. That approach doesn’t work in the event management space. When Show Imaging supports a concert with 25,000 people on-site, for example, the odds that the team will have to activate at least part of its emergency action plan are high. 

Heavy rain, lightning or high winds may not make the news, Henry explains, but they still force fast calls on safety, staffing and crowd management. “We may have to activate some or all of that crisis plan multiple times within a year’s time.”

How to Stress-Test a Crisis Plan Before Disruption Hits

Not every organization has 25,000 people standing in front of a concert stage when the weather takes a turn for the worse or a critical piece of equipment fails. But every organization should be stress-testing its crisis plan before the inevitable happens: a major system outage, a catastrophic weather event, a missed supplier deadline, a negative social post or a product recall. 

Why Crisis Plan Testing Improves Executive Decision-Making

Stress-testing can’t eliminate all risks, but it does make crisis plans more useful if and when they’re needed. It forces companies to examine decision-making, communications, staffing and operational response before a real event exposes the weak spots, a process that Henry refers to as “training” the plan.

“When you take the time to train your crisis plan, you’ll have a coordinated response that includes fighting the fire itself, communicating internally and externally and managing downstream risk and effects,” he concludes. “If you don’t, you’re pretty much guaranteeing a very uneven and narrow response.”