How to run a tabletop exercise in about two hours

The Cabinet Office and its Emergency Planning College describe a tabletop as a structured, collaborative discussion in a non-operational setting. Their Exercising Best Practice Guidance is non-statutory, and it sets no fixed time periods, so the timings below are our own suggestion. For many teams the duty behind the exercise is real enough: under regulation 25 of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 (Contingency Planning) Regulations 2005, a plan kept by a general Category 1 responder must provide for exercises that check the plan is effective, and for staff training.

A tabletop is cheap and repeatable. It exposes unclear authority, missing contacts, wrong assumptions and decisions nobody expected to take. It will not show you how long it takes to lift a stretcher down a stairwell or whether the radios reach the valley floor. For those you need a live exercise, and a good tabletop will tell you which part is worth the trouble.

In the preparedness cycle this is the TRAIN stage, and its findings go into LEARN and CHANGE THE WORLD MODEL. For that reason, use your real plan. An invented town teaches little about your own bridge.

The guidance asks for objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Two hours will support three at most. Write each one so an observer can answer yes, partly or no.

• Within 15 scenario minutes of the first warning, the duty officer names who is in charge and who has been told.
• The group identifies every care setting in the flood zone from the plan, without phoning anyone who is not in the room.
• When mobile phones are declared down, the group sets out how each team will be reached, and by what time.

Score the objectives, leaving individuals out of it. Evaluators mark each objective as met, partly met or not met, and write one line of evidence from the scribe’s log. Separate three kinds of finding: a gap in the plan, a gap in knowledge or training, and a gap in resources. Each leads somewhere different.

The guidance expects a hot debrief at the end, led by the exercise director, before people leave. A cold debrief follows in the days or weeks after, and feeds a post-exercise report that goes to whoever manages lessons. For a small team that report can be one page. Our guide on how to run a debrief has an agenda and a lessons register. For multi-agency exercises, JESIP publishes an optional Exercise Assurance Framework, and JOL Online takes the interoperability lessons.

Sinkaos can turn a real mission plan into a training scenario without changing the original, and runs exercises in a clearly marked training mode, so simulated events cannot be mistaken for real ones. Injects, branches and evaluation against criteria are built in, and findings can propose changes to plans, routes and maps. See training and exercises.