I ran response from the World Bank's Global Watch Desk for our offices in 188 countries — through the Haiti earthquake and other major natural disasters, the Arab Spring, coup attempts, cyber attacks, kidnappings, terrorist bombings, protests, political unrest, and anything else that challenged our ability to keep the business running. Then I spent a decade at Deloitte turning that experience into programs for clients that regulators accept. At The Crisis Studio, we build the pressure test that finds where your executive team breaks, and deliver it in a room where that's safe. Then we help you fix what broke.
Too many executive exercises are built around generic scenarios and predetermined discussion questions. The simulation identifies the weaknesses. The remediation work closes them.
An event. A line item, a compliance checkbox, priced once and forgotten the moment the report is filed.
A live session built to surface exactly where your governance, your decisions, and your people will actually fail under pressure — evidence you can act on, not just a memory of an interesting afternoon.
Every scenario is drawn from your critical services, dependencies, decision authorities, stakeholders, and existing plans. Explore a few in depth:
Every exercise is built from timed injects that escalate the way a real event does. Here's the shape of one.
Security Operations flags abnormal encryption activity across the file servers.
Customer-facing systems go offline.
A ransom note arrives. The actor claims customer data was exfiltrated.
A reporter emails your communications team requesting comment.
Your regulator requests an incident briefing.
The actor posts a sample of the stolen records publicly. What does your team do now? That's the exercise.
Four ways to work together, in order of how deep the engagement goes.
A half-day executive tabletop built on a custom scenario drawn from your real critical services and third-party dependencies, facilitated live.
Design brief · custom scenario & injects · live facilitation · decision log · after-action report · board-ready summary
A multi-scenario program that goes beyond a single tabletop — a design lab, an executive tabletop, and an observed functional or disaster-recovery test, so leadership sees not just how they'd decide, but whether the recovery actually works end to end.
Design lab · executive tabletop · observed functional/DR test · findings report · board readout
The exercise finds where your team breaks. This closes it — crisis playbooks, notification and activation protocols, and pre-drafted communications, scoped as a fixed deliverable.
Crisis playbook · notification & activation protocols · communications templates · tabletop-ready appendices
Once an exercise finds the gaps, this closes them — over a multi-month engagement.
Governance redesign · updated playbooks · re-tiering · testing calendar · progress reporting
See my full background and a representative sample of the engagements I have led throughout my career.
Reach out directly to scope an exercise. All inquiries are confidential.
Exercises often require access to crisis plans, escalation structures, technology dependencies, executive roles, and vulnerabilities. That material is handled in confidence, and NDAs are available on request.
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The Crisis Studio