The "Tabletop" Exercise

The Scenario

This is the event or situation you and your co-workers will address during the exercise. The Impact Analysis spreadsheet, in which you identified the threats to and vulnerabilities of your organization, is an excellent place to begin the construction of your tabletop scenario.

Note: Instead of a particular event, it may be a good idea to limit the focus of your scenario to broad types of disruptions. Interruptions in your ability to communicate and the loss of critical data are two potentially highly disruptive, yet fairly common events that make excellent exercise "scenarios."

The Impact

The group - the "participants" - will now join the tabletop session. This will begin with a discussion of the scenario's impact on your organization. The critical question here is, "what services and other activities would this event/situation likely disrupt?"

Response

In this section the group will discuss what each staff member and the organization should do to respond to the event. You'll need to consider how everyone will continue to work in spite of the disruption, in the first hour, day and week after the event.

Recovery

After you have talked about your initial response plan, now discuss what will need to be done in the weeks and months following the event.

Lessons Learned

At this point of the exercise, discuss what can be done now to facilitate or improve your organization's response and recovery capacity, should the event featured in your tabletop - or some other, similar event - actually occur. (This is a particularly important part of the exercise.)

After the tabletop exercise is over, the leader will collect the participant's forms. It will be the leader's responsibility to document the discussion and to file everyone's papers in your CPDR binder. Keep in mind that some participants may have written useful thoughts on their sheets that they neglected to say aloud to the group.

Evaluation

This section is to be completed by the organizations management, or the individual responsible for leading the tabletop exercise. The purpose of this is to determine what about the exercise worked, and what may be changed in the future to get more out of the experience.

Tip: The discussion that occurs during your tabletop exercise is an excellent source of content for your organizational policies and procedures. Use the best ideas developed by the group to write a response plan for whatever scenario you're considering.