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Practice the Fire: Designing Crisis Simulations and Exercises That Actually Prepare Your Team
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 18 2026
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.40
Height: 0.27 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
They fill a conference room for a morning, produce a flipchart that says ESCALATION and COMMUNICATION IS KEY, and send everyone back to their desks having rehearsed exactly one skill: describing an ideal response in the conditional tense. No real crisis will ever ask for that skill. Erik F.A. Gmelig Meyling has facilitated exercises for boards, ministries, banks, hospitals and factory sites - and sat through the other kind too: the annual tabletop everyone can predict, the report that names no one, the drill that tests nothing but the catering. In Practice the Fire, he lays out the craft that separates an exercise that changes an organization from one that merely occupies a morning. This book will show you how to:
- Match exercise format to what a team can actually bear, using the four-rung ladder from walkthrough to full simulation
- Write objectives before anyone touches a scenario - and test decisions instead of describing them
- Engineer injects with real pacing, branching and consequence, using a working Master Events List template
- Facilitate a room that includes the defensive executive instead of losing him
- Run virtual and hybrid exercises that hold up when the room is no longer a room
- Turn a hot debrief and a cold evaluation into findings that actually change the plan - not a report that gathers dust
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