If you’re lucky enough not to have a lot of crises to practice with, you can always give your crisis communication plan a run through to make sure everyone knows what to do when something does happen.

1. Come up with 2 or 3 different situations that your company might expect to run into. Downtime or outages are a common one, but perhaps include a PR or security issue in your list as well.
2. Distribute your crisis management playbook to everyone ahead of time so they can read through policies and procedures and ask any questions they have.
3. Gather everyone into a room and set aside a couple hours for the simulation.
4. Introduce the first situation by reading out a customer email, or showing a potential monitoring notice.
5. Ask participants to write down what their response would be and share in the group.
6. Continue through the crisis until everything is resolved.
7. Identify any gaps in the crisis plan or where additional preparations are needed so you can follow up after the simulation.

The crisis might need to be vague and general — but understanding who needs to be contacted, where that information is found and how customers are notified is key to a fast reaction.