A continuity plan may list the right headings while leaving important decisions unresolved. Who contacts customers if the booking system stops working? Where is the supplier number if the usual device is unavailable? A tabletop exercise lets a team examine these questions through a fictional scenario without disrupting normal operations.
Ready.gov's business preparedness guidance includes communications, technology recovery, continuity planning and exercises. The discussion format below is a lightweight operational rehearsal. It is not a substitute for emergency procedures, technical recovery testing or specialist planning for hazards relevant to your workplace.
Choose a plausible and bounded scenario
Start with an event the team can discuss concretely, such as loss of internet access during a busy afternoon. Define the start time, the affected services and what is still working. Avoid a scenario that removes every resource at once; it can become an exercise in speculation rather than a test of the current plan.
For a repair business, the scenario might be: the online scheduling service is unavailable at noon, tomorrow's visits need confirmation, and incoming calls still work. No real systems should be disabled. Make it clear that all messages, bookings and incidents discussed are fictional.
Trace the first hour
Ask who notices the problem and how they verify its scope. What can the team safely continue doing? Who decides to switch to a temporary process? Where is that process documented? What information is needed to use it, and can the team access that information without the failed service?
Record answers as proposed actions, not assumptions of capability. If someone says “we would use the backup,” ask where it is, who can access it and when it was last checked. Do not expose sensitive customer information during the exercise. Use sample records to explore the workflow.
Examine customer communication
Prepare a sample update that states the affected service, the current workaround and the next update time. Avoid giving a restoration estimate the team cannot support. Decide which person approves the update and which channels remain available in the scenario. A prepared template is useful only if someone can find and publish it.
In the scheduling example, the team may discover that customer phone numbers are available only inside the unavailable platform. That is a specific dependency to investigate through the organisation's security and privacy procedures. It is not a reason to copy customer data into an uncontrolled personal spreadsheet.
Add one development to the story
After the first discussion, introduce a realistic change: the outage continues until the next morning, or a supplier needs confirmation of a parts order. Ask whether the temporary workflow still works. How will handwritten or offline bookings be reconciled after recovery? Who checks that customers have not received conflicting messages?
Follow the handover between shifts or team members. Continuity problems often appear at those boundaries: an action is started but nobody knows whether it finished. A simple action log with an owner, time and status may be more useful than another page of general advice.
- Keep the scenario fictional and limited in scope.
- Identify decision-makers and their substitutes.
- Verify access to contacts and approved procedures.
- Prepare truthful updates with a next review time.
- Track temporary actions and later reconciliation.
- Assign each identified gap to an owner and date.
Debrief without scoring individuals
Ask what worked, what was uncertain and what should change. Separate gaps in the plan from mistakes in the exercise. A participant who cannot find a procedure has given the organisation useful evidence about accessibility, naming or training. Treat that discovery as a chance to improve the system.
Select a few concrete follow-ups, such as confirming vendor escalation contacts or testing an approved recovery process. Schedule another short exercise after those changes. The aim is a plan people can use under pressure, with tested dependencies and clear decisions, rather than a document that merely appears complete.
Sources and further reading
This original guide was prepared with AI assistance. Examples are illustrative. The edition date is an assigned date in this 2026 catalogue. See our editorial policy and report a correction.