We recently had the opportunity to work alongside the great team at Glued and the hugely talented group of students at Coventry University to develop an Virtual Reality Training offering for small businesses.

Challenges of Business Continuity Plans: The Need for Creativity

All organisations should rehearse their business continuity plans, which is typically by conducting table top exercises. These tests assess the effectiveness of processes should an organisation suffer a cyber attack, loss of key person or a key supplier. However, there’s a risk that these can become formulaic or are pushed down the priority list as other business issues take precedence. In addition, rarely do table top exercises consider the skills and behaviours of the people involved. We wanted to put this critical component to the test in a fun way.

The brief therefore was simple – we asked the students to create an virtual reality training scenario that would simulate a crisis event, forcing teams with different skills to come together to resolve the scenario. Just to make it a little more complicated, the students were on summer vacation and had to collaborate remotely, only coming together the week before our event.

The student team excelled. The scenario:

Being on a spaceship, hurtling towards a black hole. Ground Control would have to work with the person on the spaceship to solve a series of challenges to avoid catastrophe.

Whilst we appreciate that this is a scenario that I suspect none of us will ever experience, it acted as a great leveller for the teams.

So, what did we learn, and how was this relevant to the organisations that our delegates were from?

Learning Points: Insights from the Space Crisis Simulation

Read the Manual

Some of our teams set off enthusiastically, but neglected to read the manual that described the scenario and the tasks before them. In a business continuity event, it’s critical that you start by assessing the data that is in front of you before deciding on the next course of action.

Practice Makes Perfect

Equal Voices

We’d mixed our teams using the DISC profiling (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientiousness). Our dominant team members were drowning out the voices of the quieter team members. As in a business environment, when under pressure, it’s critical to ensure that all members of the team have an equal voice. The quiet person sat in the corner, studying the data may have the key to resolve the problem (or to stop a spaceship disappearing into a black hole!).

Time is Running Out!

With just 10 minutes for each scene, the teams were under pressure. They became fractious and frustrated as the spaceship crashed again into the black hole. It is important in a real scenario to step back and realise that individuals are working to resolve a problem and that sometimes the worst will happen.

Not Everyone has the Same Skill Set as You

Midway through one of the scenarios, when being asked to sort light tubes in a particular colour related order, it became apparent that one individual in the VR Headset was colour blind. In a real incident, individuals will have different strengths and weaknesses, and in a crisis scenario it is important to pull on all those strengths and accept and prepare to navigate weakness.

Not Everyone tackles problems the same way

One scenario relied on finding certain coloured bulbs. Easy enough, but the correct colour only activated when picked up by the left hand. Out of pure coincidence, one team’s users of the headsets were right hand dominant and so had no chance of coming across the solution naturally. This showed the importance of broadening your BCP review team and thinking outside of the box to increase the probability of resolving problems.

Communication

The university filmed the event (Video below), extracting team members for interview. In a real scenario, who in your organisation will make the external communications to stakeholders? Who will interface with the media (social, TV, radio) and what will they say?

Mental Health

We observed a couple of team members during the virtual reality training who were growing increasingly anxious about their turn using the VR Headset, a stark reminder that it’s critical during an incident to keep an eye on the well-being of all the team members. Pressure and stress combined with a lack of sleep impacts people in separate ways. How will your team react if the incident continues over several days? How and when will you introduce a shift system?

Laughter

Not what you would expect in a business continuity scenario, but our four teams all had great fun, as evidenced through the laughter. This was a team building activity, there was amazing collaboration and no retribution across the team.

Food!

We rewarded our teams with lunch after the event. If your business has a crisis, how will you ensure that people take breaks for food and rest? Rarely is in an incident resolved in a few hours and will typically run for days. What is your provision? Hint: the answer is not an endless delivery of take away pizza!

Wrap-up and Future Planning: Incorporating Lessons into Business Strategies

Whilst none of our teams during the virtual reality training were able to prevent the spaceship from crashing, there were a lot of lessons learned from the session, ranging from how they had worked together as a team, to their own personal reactions to the scenario and many more. As with any table top exercise, it is important to take actions away from the session, for them to be incorporated into the plans and for the scenario to be re-run with the improvements.

Without exception, the feedback that we received was incredibly positive. If you are interested in finding out more, or hosting your own scenario with the teams at Coventry University, ourselves and Glued please get in touch.