A New Method and Tools to Scenarios Design for Crisis Management Exercises

Abstract

Manager must be prepared to cope with recent crises which are complex, unpredictable, and which need fast decision-making under stress. The improvement of crisis manager’s skills is mainly possible through training which requires efficient simulation scenarios. Scenarios are the chronological synopsis of events that occur during the exercises and which enable to call specific skills of trainees. The design of a crisis exercise scenario requires therefore respecting specific criteria in order to be in coherence with abilities and objectives of learners. Moreover, scenario must reproduce characteristics and effects of a crisis (like surprise or uncertainty). The design of a well-constructed scenario for crisis management exercise is therefore a challenge for instructors. This paper deals with a new method created to help scenarists in the scenario design for crisis functional exercises. It means to make a simulated interactive exercise that tests the capability, the coordination, procedures and responsibilities of an organization to respond to an event as close to reality as possible. The approach exposed in this paper proposes to review how a model can help in the design of a scenario by reproducing the main components that lead to a crisis. It proposes a transdisciplinary and innovative approach based on crisis management knowledge, dramaturgy (theater, movies) tools, and modeling derived from system engineering method. First, the paper describes a review of existing methods and mainlines of crisis specificities. Then fundamentals of the method created are detailed. Afterwards, an analogy is made with dramaturgy in order to adapt its way to create scenarios to our specific application and to inject crisis particularities. Finally, on the basis of the previous steps, we propose to model the scenario design by means of systems engineering approach. The final objective is to develop a tool that generates automatically the story line of innovative scenarios.