Crisis and scenario games

At Evocatus we create games to help your business. – Games can be used for all sorts of training for your employees specific outcomes. – As a business, the real value comes from the observation and review process, through which lessons can be identified and shared.

TEAM BUILDING: What are Crisis & Scenario Games?

STRATEGY GAMES

To get people emotionally engaged in a game or an exercise, you need a scenario. The scenario could be huge, complex and full of detail for the players to get lost in or could be very simple and straightforward; its purpose is to give players a problem that makes them think but, more importantly, to make them care on an emotional, visceral level about the outcome.

A crisis game is simply a game which uses a crisis scenario, in which a team has to deal with a potentially damaging event and its consequences, looking for ways to foresee problems, limit damage, promote recovery and even look for unseen opportunities. A crisis could take many forms, from a political scandal to a natural disaster, but every crisis will require players to face a series of dilemmas and the need to make decisions urgently, often with incomplete information.

WHEN Would you use a scenario game for your business?

Cyber Attack Crisis Game

Social Media PR Crisis Game

International Political Crisis Game

Break-in Scenario Game

We’ve supported organisations with crisis games to achieve a range of business objectives.

The most obvious purpose is to make organisations better at crisis management, through developing teamwork, internal communications, procedures and wider risk management. Types of crisis we have simulated have included a cyber attack, changes to legislation, a social-media driven public relations crisis, international political crises and a break-in leading to the theft of high-value stock.

We can also use crisis games to achieve other objectives, using the crisis as a vehicle through which to develop people and teams. In a world where we are used to communicating through screens rather than face-to-face, the opportunity to come together and work on a bounded problem as a team can be incredibly powerful for team building. Individuals are able to demonstrate their skills and character and develop confidence, leaders are able to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their team and together they are able to develop their communication skills. We can also help leadership teams understand risk better; by going through the manifestation of an example risk, we can demonstrate the value of taking shared responsibility for the risk management function across the organisation. Crisis games can also be helpful for consent-building for change; by putting players in a position where they can feel the need for change, we can help to secure emotional buy-in for a change management programme.

What type of crisis & scenario games do Evocatus organise?

At Evocatus, we make a real effort to be agile and to maintain a focus on what we are good at – designing, planning and executing games and exercises. We can apply this skill set to a very broad range of topics and requirements; we’ve covered issues as diverse as cyber security and early life nutrition, and are always up for broadening our experience with a new topic!

We are comfortable working at a range of scales, from very simple tabletop exercises through to live events ranging over wide areas of real estate and with support from roleplayers, film content, simulated media feeds and even simulated casualties. Bigger games cost more, but can cater for more players and can explore issues in greater depth and complexity and with better facilities to help both organisation and individuals learn from the experience. Depending on the organisations requirements, we can focus on particular aspects of performance, such as crisis communication games or problem solving scenario games.

The Evocatus bespoke Game building service

Everything we deliver at Evocatus is bespoke. While we have tools and methods that we fall back on again and again, the first thing we do is to really understand what it is the customer wants to achieve. In the case of team building, the method used for an icebreaker exercise, where we want to build energy and engagement as quickly as possible, would be different from an exercise designed to develop communications within the team or to promote effective leadership.

We don’t need to deliver exercises with a topic that reflects the customer organisation’s real purpose; sometimes taking people into an exciting fictional narrative can encourage them to think beyond their usual horizons; a hostage crisis game or a mystery scenario game offer familiar tropes in which players can operate. A disaster scenario game responding to an erupting volcano on a Carribbean island can be a more accessible and dramatic way of creating and testing business continuity plans than something more mundane, such as bad weather.