Today’s business world is more risky, uncertain and crisis-prone than ever before. That’s why businesses often invest significant amounts of time and money into training – the hope being that by preparing their staff for dealing with these kinds of problems, those staff will be able to neutralise their impacts effectively if they should ever arise in reality. Whether the risk emanates from geopolitical turbulence, economic factors, strategic uncertainty or anything else, a well-prepared business is always well placed to deal with it.
But is this training really effective? Too often it takes the form of lectures and presentations, with information handed down in a prescriptive form and employees expected to learn it by rote. This sort of didactic training is neither memorable nor useful; rather than engage with it and internalise the lessons learnt, staff regularly find it forgettable. This then becomes doubly dangerous; not only are employees unprepared for crises but the business is lulled into a false sense of security because the training is assumed to have been effective.
A new alternative
A newer form of crisis training that is gaining traction is “simulation-based training.” In the workshops that apply this methodology, employees are presented with a fictional but realistic scenario, with a range of decision points for them to make and different outcomes based upon which permutation of decisions they select. Simulations come in a range of varieties – they can be for a small number of employees or for close to a hundred; they can be conducted entirely remotely or in a classroom, the very best utilising complex imagery and graphics.
Why Use Simulations
In contrast to “listen to me and learn” training, simulations offer a number of critical advantages when training staff to manage crises. Simulations involve active rather than passive participation, and this means that participants tend to have their mind “primed”; in turn, if the crisis ever occurs in reality, those participants will not merely be recalling the lessons they learned, but in fact reliving them. Lecture-based learning does not build these key neural connections; it relies purely on filling the mind with data points that can be utilised later on, but this is inherently less effective. So, why use simulations? Practice makes perfect, and using simulation based-training means that the key takeaways are practised as soon as they’re learned.
The very nature of didactic training means that only generic concepts are discussed; it’s not practically possible for a speaker to cover multiple real-world examples. But generic information is not as easily remembered as information grounded in concrete facts. In fact, simulations are far superior at creating relatable scenarios for employees to get involved in and remember long after training is concluded. Through immersing learners in an accelerated but risk-free environment, it’s possible for much more content to be internalised than would be the case through speeches and handouts.
This might in fact be one of the most important strengths of simulations; they’re enjoyable to do. And this means that there is a high degree of engagement and involvement from the people required to do the training. An engaged audience is an enthusiastic audience, and an enthusiastic audience is far more likely to take the key principles on board.
Preparing for crises
All business owners and managers hope crises never come. But sometimes such things are inevitable, caused by unpredictable forces – an earthquake, for example, or a political revolution. When they happen, they can be far more devastating than anticipated, and one of the main reasons for this is the lack of preparation by the people who will have to handle it. That’s why training for crisis management and risk mitigation is so important for business welfare; that’s why simulations are so useful in ensuring that staff are ready to handle anything that might come their way.
If you would like to learn more about innovative simulation-based crisis management training, see www.prendo.com