From Drill to Real: Why Practice Scenarios Need to Feel Uncomfortable

The Comfort Zone Problem in Crisis Testing

Organizations invest significant resources in business continuity testing, yet the results often disappoint when real emergencies strike. A 2024 study found that while close to 60% of businesses believe they can recover from a disruption within a day, only 35% actually do. That gap between expectation and reality points to a fundamental flaw in how most organizations approach crisis drills.

The problem is that most drills are designed to succeed. Scenarios follow predictable paths, participants receive advance notice, and facilitators avoid injecting the chaos that defines actual emergencies. Teams walk through their response plans without ever experiencing the cognitive overload, time pressure, and incomplete information that characterize real crises. This creates what researchers call the Dunning-Kruger effect in crisis preparedness: organizations overestimate their capabilities because they've never truly tested them under realistic conditions.

Why Discomfort Builds Better Response Capabilities

There's a reason military pilots train for emergencies thousands of times before facing one. When Captain Sullenberger landed US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in 2009, he had 208 seconds to make life-or-death decisions. His success wasn't luck or natural talent. It was decades of scenario-based training that built what crisis management professionals call decision-making muscle memory. His brain had rehearsed similar situations so many times that the right responses became automatic.

The same principle applies to organizational crisis response. When stress hormones flood your system, higher-level reasoning diminishes. Fine motor skills get sloppy. Vision narrows. The only thing that works reliably under these conditions is training that has been so thoroughly practiced it becomes instinctive. As one crisis leadership expert puts it: you don't rise to the occasion, you fall to the level of your preparation. A plan on paper is not the same as readiness.

What Uncomfortable Drills Actually Look Like

Effective tabletop scenarios inject unexpected events into the discussion because crisis events don't occur predictably. The National Association of School Psychologists specifically recommends adding new pieces of information mid-drill to make exercises more realistic. This means your ransomware scenario shouldn't follow a neat timeline. It should include surprises like discovering that your backup systems were compromised three weeks ago, or that a key team member is unreachable during the critical response window.

The most valuable exercises create genuine tension. Participants should feel time pressure, face competing priorities, and experience the frustration of incomplete information. When a pharmaceutical company runs a tabletop on a product recall, the scenario should reveal cracks: legal hesitating on messaging approval, operations struggling with supply chain alternatives, customer support flooded with questions they weren't briefed to answer. These moments of friction are where the real learning happens.

Finding the Right Level of Stress

There's an important distinction between productive discomfort and counterproductive trauma. A 2025 report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine found that exercises using simulated attacks with props like fake gunshots should be prohibited due to high potential for harm. The goal isn't to terrorize participants. It's to challenge their decision-making and reveal gaps in their response capabilities.

The sweet spot involves scenarios that are realistic enough to generate genuine stress without causing lasting psychological harm. This means avoiding surprise drills that cause panic, while still injecting enough complexity to test real decision-making. Participants should know they're in an exercise but face conditions challenging enough to expose weaknesses. Think of it like a flight simulator: everyone knows the plane isn't actually crashing, but the training still builds the reflexes needed when something goes wrong for real.

Building a Culture of Realistic Testing

The shift toward more challenging drills requires buy-in from leadership. Executives need to understand that struggling during exercises is a feature, not a bug. Organizations with a tested continuity plan are 2.5 times more likely to recover quickly from an actual disaster, and 74% of companies that test their plans regularly experience fewer disruptions overall. But these benefits only materialize when testing is rigorous enough to identify real weaknesses.

Start with basic drills and work your way up to functional exercises and full-scale simulations. Each level should introduce more complexity and stress. Track response times, document where communication breaks down, and identify the points where decision-making stalled. These insights become the foundation for targeted improvements. The discomfort you experience in a controlled drill is infinitely preferable to discovering the same gaps during an actual crisis when customers, revenue, and reputation are on the line.

Real Preparation Feels Different

The teams that handle crises best are the ones who struggled most during practice

From Checkbox to Capability

Running a crisis exercise once a year to satisfy compliance requirements isn't enough. True organizational resilience comes from a continuous commitment to realistic testing that challenges teams to improve. The organizations that handle real emergencies best are typically the ones whose practice sessions felt the most uncomfortable. They've experienced the friction, identified the gaps, and built the muscle memory to respond effectively when it matters.

The next time your crisis drill wraps up smoothly with everyone feeling good about the results, ask yourself: did we just practice succeeding, or did we actually prepare for failure? The answer to that question might be the difference between recovery and catastrophe when a real crisis arrives.