Readiness and training
How do you and your team measure up? Will your plans, processes, technology, procedures and personnel collectively work in a incident? Organisational biases and individual unconscious motivations can cloud an organisation’s capability to objectively review, assess, challenge and evaluate their capabilities.
Challenges
Exercises are an expensive use of your team and can build or break the confidence of your Managers and stakeholders. Generic training lacks organisational context, leaving your attendees with generic knowledge but without application to your plans. Debriefing an Incident, Exercise or Event is arguably the most critical phase for your organisational improvement and needs to be handled objectively.
- Participant fatigue and poor buy-in can result from low complexity and generic nature of some training and Exercise solutions
- External parties can help or hinder your readiness – depending on the extent of their knowledge, skills and judgement to support you.
- Lack of internal capacity, experience and independence to debrief an incident, exercise or event can leave your organisation unable to effectively demonstrate continuous organisational improvement
- Exercises and Debriefs can become a negative experience if your team do not feel valued and engaged.
How we can help
Our team have conducted a wide range of training, Exercises and debriefs across a wider range of sectors including Government, construction, transport, telecoms, housing, fire and rescue and major events. We have also delivered integrated programmes such as the Readiness, Training and Exercising strategy for construction clients, Government projects and the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
- Our training is always customised to the audience, utilising an extensive set of good practice content and spending the development time focused on aligning it with your plans and procedures.
- Our Exercises leave attendees feeling that they have really taken part in an incident – with the rigour, challenge and engaging experiences that they will remember.
- We handle sessions with empathy and a solid evidence base, reflecting on what could be done better but also recognising successes and good practice.
Exercises: Simulations, Table-Top, Command Post and Live Exercises
Tired, one dimensional Exercises supported by slides and a talking head no longer cut it with today’s audience. The majority of our Exercises are Simulations – involving a blend of media including ‘pseudo media’ to replicate the stakeholder, customer and public pressures on your organisation using the TeamXP platform directly to player’s devices with media support from Capital B Media. This approach enables us to run fully remote Exercises with shared scenario content and break out rooms for different command groups/experts and real time evaluation tools.
Whether you require a simple Table-Top, multi-level Command Post or even a Live Exercise, our delivery approach usually involves five key aspects:
- Testing or at least validating single components of readiness (eg functions and processes or an existing decision making group)
- Using our experience to create a challenging and constructive readiness programme for your team
- Imparting our extensive resources gathered over ten years and our subject matter experts to design bespoke materials for your session(s).
- Utilising technology (where appropriate) to capture decisions and feedback from single- or multi-sites/rooms, using our tried and tested information management platform
- Incorporating lessons identified from your readiness programme into revised work programmes, documentation, activities, tasks, interdependencies and milestones.
Face to face and Online Training
Your people are critical to the effectiveness of your response and our services are geared heavily towards preparing and supporting the training and development of your managers and staff. Topics range from Crisis and Incident Management, Control Room and Loggist courses through to radio training and Business Continuity.
Our Continuing Professional Development (CPD) certified courses and Webinars are aligned to relevant National Occupational Standards and doctrine with customisation to fit your arrangements.
Online training has grown significantly since COVID-19 and while we cannot wait to get back to the classroom/board room, we have delivered engaging and challenging training sessions using a blend of face to face, e-learning, video content, simulations and we design our content to cater for different learning styles and utilise Articulate to deliver your programme (or content which you can embed in your e-learning environment).
Debriefs and Workshops
Our thorough debrief and workshop sessions usually involve three phases: a pre-engagement survey of managers and staff, structured debrief session(s) followed by our debrief analysis which is accompanied by a prioritised action plan. Our approach is informed by relevant standards and guidance including National Occupational Standards (pdf) and industry guidance.
Our web based sessions provide a cost-effective way for you to identify and analyse gaps and to then have an ongoing work programme which is risk rated and prioritised. We have delivered online surveys, Sponsor interviews and then workshops with over 50 participants, facilitated in different break out rooms and plenary spaces in order to maximise the engagement with your team.
