What makes an effective (and ineffective) TTX? We’re big fans of tabletop exercises, but they’re not the right tool for every situation. For example, when you’re training a response team you need to focus more heavily on operations-based exercises (drills, role-plays, and even full simulations). 

Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages of tabletops:

Pros

·       Lower intensity: Unlike operations-based exercises, a TTX is normally a lower stress discussion that doesn’t put participants into a “live fire” situation. Don’t get me wrong, the discussions can get intense but it’s a different kind of stress than performing in real time.

·       Inexpensive: Even the most elaborate TTX usually takes a few hours and doesn’t require a large team to deliver. We can normally execute a tabletop with a few hours of preparation and scenario planning, the event itself, and post-event next action reporting. 

·       Flexible: While a TTX is often held in a face-to-face meeting, you can also conduct a very effective tabletop with a remote team. This also reduces travel expense and time lost to travel. It’s especially effective for a response team that is geographically dispersed.

Cons

·       Unrealistic: You must design scenarios well, or the exercise can be unrealistic. You won’t experience resource constraints and response can seem a lot simpler than it is in real-life.

·       Lower intensity: The lower intensity is also a disadvantage of tabletop exercises. You’re never going to simulate the intensity of an actual event during a tabletop. Instead, you’ll need to use operations-based exercises.

·       Doesn’t build response capacity: These exercises aren’t designed to build skills like operations-based exercises. They have value to identify areas to test later in operations-based exercises, but they don’t build skills on their own. They must be part of a more comprehensive response team development plan.

Many tabletops are heavy on brainstorming. Like any brainstorm, the output is often wide-ranging and not prioritized. This is an advantage of brainstorming: it encourages creativity and looking at problems from different perspectives. 

While brainstorming has advantages, it can also send conversations off in unproductive directions. Further, it tends to give equal priority to things that don’t deserve equal focus. This can reduce that value of the time spent in the exercise. You can overcome these challenges with a skillful facilitator and with strong scenario design.

Another key component to the success of a tabletop exercise is well-defined scenarios the team will attack. It is normally better to tabletop a narrow scenario (response to a petition or walkout at a specific location, for example) versus numerous different scenarios, especially at first. Over time you may choose to broaden scenarios to test the interplay between different response strategies, or to test resource constraints. But generally, narrower scenarios give you more focused outcomes.

Another design feature we call a “Left of Boom” TTX. You’ve heard of a post-mortem, right? Most tabletop exercise designs ask the team to react to the scenario, kind of like a post-mortem after a negative event. This is what we call responding “Right of Boom.” 

In a Left of Boom TTX you first ask the team to explore how we got here. This is a pre-mortem. The negative event happened, but how did we get here?

This twist may seem insignificant, but it really impacts the conversations and work you do. Before you ever explore the response, you first identify the most likely root causes of the negative event. That not only informs the discussion you’ll eventually have about the appropriate response activities, but also identifies important gaps you can shrink to avoid problems in the first place.

For example, a common scenario for a traditional tabletop might be that a location experiences a walkout or a strike. The team is asked to play out the different ways the organization would respond. The “left of boom” version initially asks, “if we experienced a walkout or a strike at this location, how did we get there?”

Asking the “how we got here” question will identify gaps that aren’t specifically related to your response (right of boom) gaps. These are proactive ways to avoid the negative event from happening at all.

I prefer orienting TTX discussions using this left of boom/right of boom framework. It gets the team to look at both sides of a negative event. It uncovers more actionable ideas than the traditional post-mortem exercise alone. It's more likely to identify issues that are within your span of control.

The other challenge with traditional tabletop exercises is action planning after the event. I leave a lot of tabletop discussions feeling like they were intriguing, but vague about what happens next. This is why you should make sure to close the TTX by asking the team to identify the highest priority actions to take based on that day’s discussion.

My favorite way to do this is with a whiteboard and sticky notes (you can also do this on a virtual whiteboard). The team identifies all the key issues and writes them on a post-it note. You then place the post-it notes on a 2X2 grid, where the X axis is “impact” and the Y axis is “difficulty.” Then the team posts each issue or action somewhere on the grid based on the impact that issue has and how easy or difficult it will be to solve.

This is a visual way to identify a handful of “low hanging fruit” action items. Your most important action items will have the highest impact and be easy to implement. In addition, you’ll identify high-impact items that may be more difficult to accomplish. Those can go on a longer-term project plan.

A TTX is a great way to keep a response team fresh. Tabletop exercises can engage your response team without having to be physically together. You still need to do operations-based activities (which you can also do virtually by the way) but occasional TTX exercises can also identify areas where the team might need additional development. Additionally, the response team members can be deployed to tackle some of the “low hanging fruit” projects you identify in the TTX.

Because tabletops are a lower time commitment, you can also invite higher level executives to participate alongside subject matter experts. Executives without much labor experience will learn a lot from these exercises. I've seen light bulbs go off during these exercises where top executives realize the company is not ready to respond to a scenario. Suddenly the response team gains executive sponsorship and additional resources.

Interested in being ready with an answer when your CHRO “pops the question?” If you’d like to add tabletop exercises to your labor relations strategy let us know. We’re happy to walk you through scenario design and can even facilitate a TTX for your team.