Rehearsing the Fall: A Ninety-Minute Drill for the Crisis Your Strategy Has Not Yet Met

Every leadership team has a version of the same offsite photograph: the strategy on the wall, the roadmap in three colours, the confident summary of what success will look like in eighteen months. What almost never appears on the agenda is the rehearsal of the moment it goes wrong. We plan the climb in detail and leave the rescue to instinct.

That asymmetry is understandable. Boards and executive teams are conditioned to present momentum. Yet the strategies that fail rarely fail slowly enough for comfort. A anchor client moves its account, a funding round closes short, a regulator publishes guidance that redraws the boundary of what is permissible. In each case the quality of the first seventy-two hours determines far more than the quality of the original plan.

Why the ascent gets all the practice

Rehearsing the fall feels like tempting fate, and it also exposes something uncomfortable: that the team may not actually know who decides what when the pressure arrives. It is far more agreeable to discuss market sizing.

There is a structural reason too. Strategy documents are written in the indicative mood — we will, we expect, we intend. Crisis is written in the conditional and the past tense. The two demand different muscles, and only one of them is routinely exercised.

A drill is not a risk register. A risk register catalogues what might happen; a drill reveals how the team behaves when it does. One is a document, the other is evidence.

Choosing the fall worth rehearsing

Resist the temptation to invent something exotic. The most useful scenario is the one the team privately considers plausible but has not discussed aloud. Three candidates tend to surface in UK leadership teams:

• The lost anchor client. A single relationship that represents a material share of revenue gives notice, or signals that it will.
• The funding gap. A committed round or a refinancing slips, and the runway shortens by two quarters rather than two weeks.
• The regulatory shock. Guidance from a body such as the FCA, the ICO or a sector regulator lands with implications the team has not costed.

Pick one. Choosing three turns a drill into a seminar. The scenario should be specific enough to argue about: name the client, name the sum, name the date it becomes public.

Setting the room before anyone speaks

Ninety minutes rewards preparation. Two decisions made in advance will determine whether the exercise produces insight or theatre.

First, assign roles that differ from the day job. The person who normally owns the commercial relationship should not run the response; let them play the client, the journalist or the regulator. Rotation reveals dependency. A team that cannot function when one person is recast has found its single point of failure.

Second, write the decision rights on a flip chart before the clock starts. Who may commit spend without reference upward? Who speaks to the client? Who informs the board, and within what window? Ambiguity here is the finding, not the obstacle.

Appoint three observers whose only task is to note, silently: who spoke first, whose view was sought, who was overruled without being heard, and where the conversation stalled.

The ninety minutes, in four movements

Minutes 0–10: the brief. Read the scenario aloud, once, in plain terms. No discussion. Then ask each participant to write, privately, the single first action they would take. Collect the cards but do not read them yet.

Minutes 10–40: the response. The team works the problem as though it were live. Real numbers, real names, real trade-offs. The facilitator interrupts twice with injections of new information: a press enquiry, a client call, a board member asking for a view.

Minutes 40–65: the communication. Draft the two messages that matter — one to the people most affected internally, one to the external party with the most leverage. Read them aloud. Brevity is not the test; clarity of ownership is.

Minutes 65–90: the debrief. Return to the cards. Compare the first instincts with what actually happened. Then run the questions below.

Questions that expose the gaps

A debrief earns its keep through specificity. These tend to work:

1. Where did the team hesitate because nobody was sure they were allowed to act?
2. Who carried the most load, and did they choose it or absorb it by default?
3. What did we assume would be true, and who was responsible for checking it?
4. At what point did we start protecting the plan rather than the organisation?
5. Which of our stakeholders heard from us last, and why?
6. If this had happened on a Friday evening, what would have changed?

The fourth question is usually the one that quietens the room. It is also the one worth returning to.

Reading the debrief: signs you rehearsed good news

Some drills fail politely. Watch for these signals.

• The scenario is resolved within twenty minutes, and everyone appears relieved.
• No decision is made without the chief executive present, even in simulation.
• The conversation drifts to attribution — whose area this would be — rather than sequence and action.
• Communication is discussed last and briefly, as an administrative afterthought.
• Nobody disagrees with anyone in a way that costs them something.

Any one of these is a note for next time. Three together suggest the team has rehearsed reassurance rather than recovery.

Making it a fixture

One drill is a curiosity; a rhythm is a capability. Quarterly is sufficient, and the scenario should rotate across commercial, financial and regulatory territory so no single function is rehearsed into complacency. Keep a short record: the decisions made, the assumptions logged, the two or three gaps identified. Review the previous record at the start of the next session.

There is a further benefit that rarely appears in the write-up. Teams that have rehearsed a fall tend to speak more candidly about risk in ordinary meetings. The unmentionable has been mentioned, and the temperature drops.

The mountain does not care whether you have practised the ascent. It cares rather more about whether, when something gives way, the rope is already set and everyone knows their part in the haul. Ninety minutes is a modest price for that knowledge — and considerably less than the alternative tuition.