In the event of a crisis or disaster, an effective “crisis response system” is needed. We often then think of one organisation or limit ourselves to the activities of “crisis management” to limit or eliminate the negative consequences of a crisis or disaster. In practice, however, we see that disaster response and crisis management is a matter of a group of organisations acting adequately as a system. Indeed, if the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that some organisations prioritise this system over how the organisation was organised before.
In a crisis response system, available crisis management capacity and competences are deployed at will to mitigate the consequences of an adverse event to the extent possible. Peacetime education, training and exercises (or ETE) play an important role in this, as they prepare organisations to cooperate and coordinate with each other. Nevertheless, those ETE activities are regularly limited to the boundary of one’s own organisation.
In this article for the trade journal Be Prepared (in Dutch), we therefore argue that the addition of game simulations to traditional ETE policies offers an opportunity to teach a group of organisation to act as an effective crisis response system. Indeed, game simulation as an activity gives a group of organisations both the ability to look in the mirror and form a shared view of the future.
