How to Design Crisis Management Roleplays in 6 Steps

Crisis management roleplays can completely change the game when it comes to preparing your team for the next big thing, be it a PR scandal or public health communications.

In our how-to guide, we’ll tell you exactly how you can design effective roleplays for training, including key elements, types of crisis management roleplays, and technology you can use to transform your training programs for the better. 

Crisis Management Roleplays: Why They’re Essential for Training

Crisis management is one of those things that’s difficult to practice effectively. This is mainly because crisis management involves dealing with or mitigating a crisis, so traditional training methods like instructional videos or informational pamphlets don’t work as well. 

Still, crisis management doesn’t usually come naturally. It takes practice and experience. That’s where roleplay comes in. 

Crisis management roleplays can simulate real-world crisis scenarios for new or inexperienced employees to gain some experience. Especially as crisis management often involves a team-wide effort, roleplaying can be a useful tool to incorporate into your training programs. 

3 Key Elements of Crisis Management Roleplays

Although crisis management is a broad area, most crisis management roleplays have a few things in common. Here are three key elements you’ll want to consider when implementing roleplays for your team’s training.

Assigning roles and responsibilities 

Although not all training roleplays require a team lead to assign roles and responsibilities, crisis management is unique. Because everyone on the team is involved in handling crises, it’s more useful to assign folks roles and responsibilities to ensure a smooth training. Otherwise, your team is left to guess at who should do what. 

This is especially true for peer-to-peer roleplays. With AI roleplays, you can generally let folks experiment with the scenario and find out for themselves.  

Simulating high-pressure situations with time constraints

Another key element of crisis management roleplays is using time constraints. Crisis management situations happen under pressure and can be a catalyst for stress. However, this kind of stressful environment can be hard to emulate. 

To simulate high-pressure situations, incorporate time constraints into your crisis management roleplays. So, for example, you might assign your team a “crisis” or a problem to solve in under 10 minutes. Of course, this isn’t realistic for every scenario, but it’s a good way to introduce that element of pressure.

Feedback and refinement

A common element team leads often leave out of their roleplay training is feedback. With crisis management training, it’s not good enough to simply run your team through a roleplay. You need to deliver meaningful, constructive feedback that your employees can then use to improve their skills. 

Try to use a feedback method like GROW or similar techniques to ensure the feedback gets through to your team members. 

How to Design Crisis Management Roleplays in 6 Steps

Learning how to design an effective crisis management roleplay might feel intimidating at first. After all, crisis management can encompass many types of crises, from PR and media disasters to security breaches and emergency response. 

Regardless of the type of crisis, here’s how to design meaningful crisis management roleplays in just six easy steps.

1. Think of potential crisis situations your team could face.

The easiest way to get started when it comes to crisis management roleplays is to think of actual potential crises your team might face. So, for example, if you work in public relations, that could be anything from a media scandal to a data breach or product recall. Brainstorm some potential crises you’ve faced in your experience, crises you’ve witnessed, and realistic scenarios your team might face in the future. This will help your team become as prepared as they can.

2. Outline clear goals and objectives.

Once you’ve got some scenarios in mind, set some clear goals and objectives for your team. Ideating a few SMART goals can help because they’re specific and measurable, which also makes them more achievable and realistic. 

Having some general objectives will help your team stay on track with their training and goals.

3. Assign roles and responsibilities. 

As mentioned above, assigning roles and responsibilities to your team is crucial for crisis management roleplays. Managing a crisis usually isn’t a solo effort, so it’s important to make sure everyone has a role to play.

Before presenting a roleplay scenario to your team, assign everyone a role (unless you’re using AI roleplay, in which you might not need to). That way, after the roleplay, you can evaluate how everyone did based on the responsibilities they were assigned.

4. Use a crisis script if it makes sense.

Although crisis scripts aren’t necessary for every single crisis management team, depending on your team’s job, you might want to incorporate one into your crisis management roleplays. For example, if your team works in crisis communication, it might make sense to use and incorporate a crisis script so your team can practice using one.

5. Observe and review your team’s crisis management roleplays.

A key part of building out successful crisis management roleplays is actually observing your team in action. This is important because it allows you to watch how your team would react and resolve conflict during a real crisis. Not only that, but it lets you form some opinions on how you can improve your team’s ability to respond to crises.

6. Debrief with your team for refinement and improvement.

But you won’t want to keep these observations to yourself. Instead, make a point to review and debrief with your team after every crisis management roleplay. This can speed up team-wide improvement while also identifying areas that you can tighten up when you design other crisis management roleplays. 

Crisis Management Roleplays Using Yoodli

Designing crisis management roleplays might feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. If you aren’t sure where to start, look to Yoodli to facilitate any of your roleplay enablement needs.

Yoodli — a communication coach and roleplay platform powered by AI — offers tons of realistic roleplay scenarios for any and every need. It’s the perfect tool to design crisis management roleplays for teams to improve their preparedness and response to crises. 

Although users can pick from Yoodli’s huge collection of existing roleplay scenarios, its Builder tool allows teams to design custom roleplays to fit their most pressing needs. For example, team leads can design roleplays for media scandals, roleplays for healthcare teams, and everything in between. 

No matter what scenario you design for your team, your employees will interact with an AI-generated partner to engage in realistic, back-and-forth conversation. After listening to the user, it responds and reacts in real time, just like a human would. 

But Yoodli’s benefits for crisis management roleplays don’t end there. Yoodli analyzes the user’s performance during their roleplay and as a result, they’ll receive detailed insights and metrics around their delivery, listening, and speaking patterns. Using those personalized metrics, Yoodli offers actionable feedback and tips that folks can use to improve their response to crises. 

No matter what types of crises you and your team are preparing for, you can get started for free at https://yoodli.ai/ to improve your preparedness.

4 Common Types of Crisis Management Roleplays

Crisis management as a whole encompasses lots of areas and industries, from healthcare to PR and media, and government organizations. Here are four common types of crisis management roleplays you can leverage for your team.

1. Natural disaster simulations

Of course, it’s not realistic to simulate the actual disaster, but crisis management roleplays can help teams better prepare for the real thing. Because natural disasters like earthquakes, wildfires, and flooding can disrupt operations, teams can work on coordinating their efforts to provide relief to targeted areas as well as the communications behind their efforts. 

2. Conflict resolution scenarios for workplaces

Even simple conflict resolution scenarios can yield more prepared crisis management teams. Building and sharpening your conflict resolution skills makes it much easier to handle internal and external conflict. Plus, these types of scenarios give folks an opportunity to practice complementary skills like active listening, negotiation, and effective communication. 

3. Cybersecurity risks or data breach simulations

Cybersecurity risks like data breaches are more common than ever in the digital age. There are plenty of examples of these types of roleplays — from data breaches to scams — and they can help a team know what to expect. For example, teams might practice identifying cybersecurity risks as well as their response and coordination with other teams. 

4. Media and PR crises roleplays

When your company or client’s reputation is at stake, chances are, you have a media or PR crisis on your hands. Crisis management roleplays can help teams prepare for things like media scandals or backlash after a product recall, for example. You can have your employees practice effective communication around the crisis while also preparing them for tricky questions from members of the media.

Tools to Use for Crisis Management Roleplays

Thanks to the emergency of new technology like artificial intelligence, training and enablement doesn’t look the same as it used to. Here are some straightforward tools you can use when designing your crisis management roleplays.

AI and virtual roleplays 

Virtual roleplays, especially ones that leverage AI, provide a next-level training experience for folks in crisis management. Although peer-to-peer roleplays work for training, AI roleplays add another level of realism for employees in training. Platforms like Yoodli routinely use AI to make roleplay more realistic to what you’d experience in real life. 

There are many ways you can use AI for roleplay, from drafting crisis scripts to engaging in intelligent roleplay with an AI-generated partner. 

Specific crisis simulators 

There are also specific crisis simulators that teams can use alongside AI roleplay to incorporate into a training program. For example, these simulators can emulate a cyber attack to see how teams would react and respond. Practicing their decision-making skills in a controlled environment is a great way to see how effective a crisis plan is.

The Main Takeaway 

Crisis management roleplays can help you best prepare your team for any crisis, from natural disaster and emergency communications to media scandals. Plus, with an AI-powered tool like Yoodli, creating specific, custom roleplays for your needs and use cases is easier than ever.

Sources

• Ready.gov: “Crisis Communication Plans.”
• Immersive Labs: “Team-based Cyber Crisis Simulation.”