Running a crisis exercise when key people cannot attend

Why is attendance the real bottleneck?

An executive exercise needs the chief executive or their delegate, legal, communications, the technical lead and often finance and operations. Finding two hours when all of them are free can take weeks. Each postponement pushes the exercise towards the end of the year, and the annual exercise becomes a box that is ticked in December.

Option 1: rehearse the deputy

Incidents do not wait for the right person to land. If the general counsel is on a flight, their deputy decides. Inviting the deputy is not a compromise; it tests the succession the plan relies on. Record who stood in and whether they had the authority and information they needed.

Option 2: simulate the missing seat

Some platforms fill empty roles with simulated participants. Reflex Security describes AI agents that can take any seat nobody fills, including the CEO's. The value is that the people present still face the pressure the absent role would create: a chief executive asking for a timeline, a regulator asking for a call. The limit is that you learn nothing about how the real person would behave, so schedule them into a later session.

Option 3: play asynchronously

Not every decision needs everyone at the same time. Asynchronous play, which Reflex lists among its features, lets a team work through stages over a day. It suits distributed teams and time zones. It reduces time pressure, so pair it with a synchronous session at least once a year.

Option 4: make the session shorter

Short formats lower the cost of attending. iluminr describes microsimulations of 3–5 minutes for one person and 30–45 minutes for a team, and TryHackMe states a 10-minute average launch for its tabletops. A 30-minute exercise on one decision is easier to schedule than a half day on the whole plan, and repeated often it may teach more.

How do you prevent absences in the first place?

Book the annual simulation as early as the board calendar, and treat it like a board meeting rather than a training session. Send each participant one paragraph on why their seat matters and which decision they will own. Keep the session to the time promised. And let the executive sponsor, not the security team, send the invitation: attendance follows seniority of the sender more than the quality of the agenda.

What should the report say about absences?

• Who was absent and who stood in.
• Which decisions were delayed or changed because of it.
• Whether the plan names a deputy for every critical role, and whether that deputy knew it.
• What would have happened if the absence had lasted the whole incident.

An exercise that cannot run without one particular person has already found its first finding. Write it down, give it an owner, and make sure the next exercise runs whether or not that person can attend.