Wednesday, December 18, 2002

crisis mode

I'm playing in the University's "Crisis Response Exercise". The policy people are in another room; as a member of the Network Services group, I'm sitting with the operations folk. The crisis we're gaming includes a weather emergency that shuts down travel - pretty plausible for Wisconsin. My boss lives a half hour outside of town, while I live a ten minute walk from campus. If this were real, he'd have been stuck on the highway somewhere. Halfway through, he asks me to take his place, while he sits behind me with the other backups.

Two officers from the UW Police department are acting as facilitators, and doing a very professional job. If it weren't for the uniforms (and the guns), these guys could pass as corporate trainers. The situation unfolds as a series of PowerPoint slides that detail what's happening. As the exercise progresses, new factors are announced that make our life harder. Various situations develop in campus buildings. The outside world has its own troubles, and wants things from campus that we may not be able to provide - we've got troubles of our own, now. At some points, a subcrisis grows beyond a campus concern and we realize that it's time to turn it over to a different organization and stop trying to do it all ourselves.

The network group has little to do compared with the other operations people; the network wouldn't be affected much by the kinds of problems in this exercise. There's a question about students who are stuck in the dorms, with most of their services cut off and with no way to travel. Someone suggests we increase the network bandwidth available to the dorms and declare "Fast Download Day"! Everyone laughs.

Periodically, we send a runner to the policy group to ask for guidance. At other times, the runner tells us they want us to do something (once, it's something the operations people did half an hour before they asked us to - score!). Someone asks why we're not in the same room? One of the police lieutenants recalls that, in their sergeant days, the recipe for disaster was "More than one lieutenant at an incident scene". Some of us have done crisis gaming at other Universities, and assure us that not having the policy people looking over every move we make is a good thing.

The UW Police facilitators debrief us afterwards. Years ago, I was in a pilot group for UW's "How To Run A Successful Meeting" training, and I remember their chief and some of the officers from that class. It's still a widely used methodology on campus, and when they open the evaluation with "What went well" I feel right at home. I've watched groups that are new to this method struggle with this opener - most of us equate evaluation with confessing our sins. Today's group is experienced, though, and launches right into pointing out the things that other people did right. There is no matching "What went wrong" question. Instead, we're asked "What would you do different next time?", which is a question focused on improvement, not on blame.

And so we go home, through a winter's night which has a comfortable, record high temperature, totally unlike the nightmare of natural and manmade disasters we've gamed this afternoon.