Training, Testing, & Exercising Best Practices for Resilience Innovators

It’s not always easy to figure out your Training & Exercise programs. What exercises do your teams really need to run? What if you have limited resources? How do you identify training gaps in your teams? While your Training & Exercise programs should always be evolving, there are some best practices to follow to make sure that you and your teams are keeping innovation at the forefront of your program development.

Before we can understand how to make your Training & Exercises programs the most successful they can be, we need to understand why most programs fail. 

Our recommended answer to some of these common pitfalls is to run a strategic planning workshop that both motivates your team and sets you up for future success.

There are some key things we need to recognize about the training/exercise development cycle to enhance resilience and ultimately increase your team’s efficacy.

A common mistake is routine. We run our exercises to prepare for all scenarios, but sometimes, we get stuck in the same old exercise routine, which actually hurts our chances of being fully prepared when we run into a real scenario. One way to avoid getting stuck in a routineized rut is to utilize different formats for learning. Perhaps your team has never run exercises in a game format or utilized tabletops to run scenarios. Varying your learning formats keeps your team on its toes and allows them to absorb information in different ways, ultimately leading to greater information retention and resilience.

There are two general types of learning formats–discussion-based and operations-based–that you’ll definitely want to utilize when planning your training schedule. But when to employ one or the other is as much art as it is science.