---
title: How to Plan a Mock Disaster Exercise That Tests Decisions
description: Plan a mock disaster exercise that tests decisions, roles, communication, and recovery actions with clear objectives, realistic injects, and follow-up.
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---

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# How to Plan a Mock Disaster Exercise That Tests Decisions

 Richard Long

 Updated on: September 18, 2026

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A mock disaster exercise should do more than keep people busy for an hour or two. It should force the team to make decisions it could face during a real disruption, expose assumptions, and produce actions that improve readiness.

The scenario matters, but the design discipline matters more. A useful exercise starts with clear objectives, gives participants realistic information in stages, and creates enough pressure to reveal how the team actually escalates, communicates, prioritizes, and recovers.

**In short**

- Decide what the exercise must prove before you write the scenario.
- Use realistic injects that force choices, not just discussion.
- Match complexity to the maturity of the team.
- Observe decisions, communication, handoffs, and recovery actions.
- End with assigned improvement actions and a plan to retest.

## Start With What the Exercise Must Prove

A mock disaster exercise is not a scenario-writing contest. The purpose is to learn something useful about the organization.

Before you decide whether the scenario involves a cyber incident, facility outage, supplier disruption, severe weather event, or another problem, decide what you want to observe.

You may want to know whether:

- the right people recognize when an issue should be escalated
- leaders understand who has decision authority
- the Crisis Management Team can establish priorities with incomplete information
- communications move through the right approval path
- business teams can identify workable alternatives
- recovery teams understand dependencies and sequencing
- unresolved issues from a previous exercise have actually been corrected

For many teams, a focused exercise with a small number of clear objectives is easier to evaluate than a complex exercise that tries to test everything at once.

For a broader look at exercise formats and how they fit into a continuity program, see our [guide to recovery exercises](https://mha-it.com/blog/recovery-exercises).

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## 12 Steps to Plan a Mock Disaster Exercise

### 1. Review Previous Exercises and Open Actions

Start with what you already know.

Review observations, corrective actions, and unresolved issues from previous exercises. If a past exercise exposed a serious weakness, consider whether the new exercise should retest it.

An exercise program should show improvement over time. If the same issue appears again and again, the problem is no longer the exercise. It is the follow-through.

### 2. Define the Scope and Exercise Type

Be clear about what is in scope.

Are you testing executive decision-making, crisis-team coordination, business recovery, technology recovery, communications, or a combination of these?

The format should fit the objective. A discussion-based exercise may be enough to evaluate escalation and leadership decisions. A more functional exercise can be useful when you need people to perform procedures, use systems, or coordinate real handoffs.

Keep the scope manageable. A focused exercise makes it easier to observe what happened and determine what needs to improve.

### 3. Set Three to Five Specific Objectives

Write the objectives before you write the scenario.

Good objectives describe what you want the team to demonstrate.

Examples include:

- Confirm that the Crisis Management Team can escalate a major disruption within the expected timeframe.
- Evaluate whether leadership can set business priorities when several services are affected at once.
- Test whether internal and external communications follow the documented approval process.
- Validate that business teams understand their manual workarounds.
- Confirm that technology recovery decisions align with business recovery priorities.

Three to five objectives is a practical starting range for many exercises, not a fixed requirement. The right number depends on the scope, participants, and maturity of the team.

Avoid objectives such as “test the plan.” They are too broad to tell you whether the exercise succeeded.

### 4. Choose Participants and Clarify Roles

Invite the people whose decisions, actions, or coordination you actually want to test.

That may include executives, Crisis Management Team members, business-unit leaders, continuity staff, IT or disaster recovery teams, communications, facilities, legal, security, or other specialists.

Also decide who will not participate. Subject matter experts who help build the scenario may be better used as exercise controllers or observers so they do not coach participants through the problems they helped create.

### 5. Build a Scenario That Fits the Organization

The scenario should be realistic enough that participants spend their time solving the problem rather than debating whether it could happen.

Use the organization’s actual operating environment, dependencies, locations, suppliers, technology, customer commitments, and decision structure as inputs.

The scenario does not need to be dramatic. A plausible outage that disrupts the right dependency can reveal more than an extreme event that bears little resemblance to how the organization actually works.

### 6. Create Injects That Force Decisions

Injects are the pieces of new information delivered as the exercise unfolds.

A useful inject changes the situation or forces the team to make a decision.

Examples include:

- a critical vendor says recovery will take longer than expected
- a second facility becomes unavailable
- a customer asks for a recovery commitment
- employees begin posting unconfirmed information publicly
- a workaround cannot support expected volume
- an application recovers, but a dependent service does not
- leadership asks whether a critical service can resume safely

Avoid using injects only to add noise. Each one should support an objective or test an assumption.

### 7. Build a Timeline With Branches

Map the exercise from the opening event through the major decision points.

Then build alternatives.

Participants may make a choice you did not expect. The exercise should be able to continue without forcing them back onto a scripted path.

Prepare extra injects that can increase pressure, expose a dependency, or move the scenario forward based on the decisions the team makes.

### 8. Define the Facilitator and Observer Roles

The facilitator controls pace, introduces information, asks questions when needed, and keeps the exercise connected to its objectives.

The facilitator should not solve the problem for the team.

Observers have a different job. They capture what actually happened. That includes decisions, delays, confusion, missing information, workarounds, escalation, communication issues, and places where the documented plan did not match reality.

If the same person is trying to facilitate, take detailed notes, manage injects, and evaluate performance, important evidence will be lost.

If the team also needs help strengthening participant readiness before an exercise, see our guidance on [crisis management training](https://mha-it.com/blog/crisis-management-training).

### 9. Decide What Evidence You Will Capture

Do not wait until the exercise starts to decide what success looks like.

For each objective, identify what observers should capture.

| Capability | What to Capture |
| --- | --- |
| Escalation | Who recognized the trigger, who was notified, and whether escalation occurred when expected |
| Decision authority | Who made the decision, what information was used, and whether ownership was clear |
| Communication | What messages were needed, who approved them, and whether the right audiences were identified |
| Business recovery | How teams prioritized services, dependencies, people, workarounds, and resources |
| Technology recovery | Whether technical recovery choices matched business priorities and dependencies |
| Coordination | Where handoffs worked, where they broke down, and what information was missing |

This turns the exercise from an event into evidence.

### 10. Conduct a Dry Run

Before the exercise, walk through the scenario with the facilitation team.

Check timing. Confirm the inject sequence. Make sure the scenario is internally consistent. Verify that exercise materials are ready and that the team understands when to intervene.

A dry run often exposes gaps that are hard to see on paper.

### 11. Facilitate Without Rescuing the Team

During the exercise, give participants enough information to act, then let them work.

Do not answer every difficult question for them. Do not steer them toward the decision you expected. The value comes from seeing how the team behaves when information is incomplete and pressure increases.

Step in when the exercise has stalled for a reason unrelated to the objective, or when clarification is needed to keep the scenario credible.

The goal is not to make the team look good. It is to learn where the program is strong and where it needs work.

### 12. Debrief, Assign Actions, and Retest

The exercise is not finished when the scenario ends.

Hold an immediate debrief while the experience is still fresh. Ask what worked, what did not, what surprised the team, and what information or authority was missing.

Then convert the findings into actions with owners and target dates.

Separate observations from actual improvement actions. “Communication was slow” is an observation. “Define the emergency message approval path and validate it in the next exercise” is an action.

When an exercise exposes a meaningful weakness, plan to retest it.

## What to Capture During the Exercise

The best exercise notes are specific enough to support a decision after the event.

Capture:

- the decision that had to be made
- who owned it
- the information available at the time
- what information was missing
- how long the decision took
- what plan, procedure, or assumption the team relied on
- where a handoff failed
- what workaround was proposed
- what needs to change before the next exercise

This evidence makes the after-action process more useful than a general list of impressions.

## Common Mock Disaster Exercise Mistakes

### Trying to Test Too Much

If everything is being tested, it becomes difficult to tell what the results mean. Keep the scope tied to the objectives.

### Using an Unrealistic Scenario

If participants spend their time arguing with the premise, they are not spending that time making decisions.

### Adding Injects Without a Purpose

More activity does not automatically mean a better exercise. Each inject should support an objective or test an assumption.

### Letting the Facilitator Coach the Team

The exercise should reveal capability, not the facilitator’s ability to lead participants toward the expected answer.

### Failing to Define Evidence Before the Exercise

If observers do not know what to capture, the final assessment becomes subjective.

### Failing to Follow Through

Findings that never become assigned actions do not improve the program.

For another practitioner view on what separates a useful exercise from an ordinary one, see [Lessons from an Outstanding Mock-Disaster Exercise](https://mha-it.com/blog/lessons-from-outstanding-mock-disaster-exercise).

## Need Help Designing an Exercise That Tests Real Decisions?

MHA can help define objectives, build the scenario, facilitate the exercise, observe performance, and turn findings into a practical improvement list.

If the exercise is focused on leadership response, our [crisis management consulting services](https://mha-it.com/crisis-management) can help strengthen the team, plan, communication process, and exercise program.

If you also need to test technical recovery, our [disaster recovery consulting services](https://mha-it.com/disaster-recovery-consulting-services) can help connect the exercise to application, infrastructure, RTO, RPO, and dependency requirements.

The goal is not to run a more dramatic exercise. It is to learn something useful and make the program better before the next disruption.

---

## Further Reading

- [Kill the Zombies: How to Get More From Your DR Exercises](https://mha-it.com/blog/dr-exercises)
- [Beginner’s Guide to Recovery Exercises](https://mha-it.com/blog/recovery-exercises)
- [Crisis Management Training](https://mha-it.com/blog/crisis-management-training)
- [The Limitations of Tabletop Recovery Exercises](https://mha-it.com/blog/tabletop-recovery-exercises)
- [The Hidden Reasons Recovery Exercises Fail](https://mha-it.com/blog/why-recovery-exercises-fail)
- [Lessons from an Outstanding Mock-Disaster Exercise](https://mha-it.com/blog/lessons-from-outstanding-mock-disaster-exercise)

---

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#### Richard Long

Richard Long is one of MHA’s practice team leaders for Technology and Disaster Recovery related engagements. He has been responsible for the successful execution of MHA business continuity and disaster recovery engagements in industries such as Energy & Utilities, Government Services, Healthcare, Insurance, Risk Management, Travel & Entertainment, Consumer Products, and Education. Prior to joining MHA, Richard held Senior IT Director positions at PetSmart (NASDAQ: PETM) and Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT) and has been a senior leader across all disciplines of IT. He has successfully led international and domestic disaster recovery, technology assessment, crisis management and risk mitigation engagements.

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