Every organisation should have a crisis plan and test it often. We worked with a number of shopping centres across the UK, including Lakeside Village in Doncaster, to do just that.
The brief
As one of South Yorkshire's most popular outlet shopping destinations, the team at Lakeside Village wanted to ensure it's communication processes were as slick as possible, in the event that a crisis occured. Our full-day table-top crisis planning exercise put the team through its paces, running a realistic yet fictional scenario at their management HQ to identify points of weakness in their crisis plan and processes and allow for them to be discussed and remedied by the organisation.
Delivery
As with any of our table-top exercises, we reviewed Lakeside Village's crisis plan and came up with a test scenario that put it through its paces.
On the day of the training, the team experienced the scenario as if it were happening with hour-by-hour real-time updates and the odd curveball to keep them focused.
It's enlightening to see how these exercises bring out people's different personalities - and how easy it is for processes and systems detailed in crisis plans to be overlooked or lost in translation.
It's a high-pressure day for the teams involved, but an exercise that always generates very interesting and meaningful outcomes for the organisation involved.
The results
Our exercise helped the team identify areas to be improved within the organisation's crisis plan, all of which were then able to be remedied by the team so that if a crisis does occur, they can rest assured they're prepared.
