It is 2am. The phone on the Chair’s bedside rings insistently. It’s the CEO, informing the Chair that the entire delegation of senior leaders attending a conference in an overseas location had been taken hostage by a lesser-known domestic guerrilla group.
You are the Chair. How do you react to finding out some of your executives are now being held hostage?
The answer might depend on a lot of factors, some personal, but others organisational.
Your heart races but you assure the CEO and initiate the crisis protocol. Your business is a critical national infrastructure company, and your last board simulation was precisely about this low probability but high-impact scenario.
In other words, you know the drill.
Board simulations, sometimes also referred to as scenarios or drills, are dress rehearsals for decision-making under pressure. With geopolitics, technologies, and climate challenges, often acting all at once to create new challenges, both risks and opportunities, savvy boards are using simulations to build their decision-making muscle for “what-when”, not just “what-if”. Like fire drills, they are not about predicting the next fire, but about ensuring that a fire alarm does not cause wide panic.
Well-designed simulations challenge existing mental models for organisational decision-making. Unlike normal board days, the board is not hands-off in a simulation but an active participant.
To avoid playing on the “easy setting”, it is worthwhile that boards invite an external facilitator who brings no prior sympathies to the leadership or the board dynamic.
A realistic scenario would typically be created using industry or business environment challenges, alongside factors such as ambiguous information, lack of clarity, time pressure, and unpredictable elements. This melange of factors demands a cool head and the ability to identify levers of control and influence in a fundamentally uncontrollable situation.
Imagine a scenario where grave whistleblowing allegations against the CEO go “viral” on TikTok before the whistleblower uses any formal channels to lodge a complaint and before the Chair or the CEO hear of it. Neither of them is on TikTok so chances are that the news is surfaced by the social listening team, who are junior employees and do not know how to escalate and to whom. That virality would require the board to take completely different steps compared to meticulously preparing “leak PR” while handling a formal whistleblowing complaint through the prescribed procedural channels.
Handling such a situation would test organisational assumptions and may reveal uncomfortable things such as the formal communication channels versus the actual ways information flows in your organisation, or board directors’ instincts such as the one to reject the messaging because it is dragging your favourite executive’s name through the mud.
The simulation would demand that the board respond keeping all stakeholders in focus balancing governance and confidentiality needs with the need to communicate with and assure employees and customers. This may entail the board invoking the right procedures, calling in external advice such as from lawyers, all in double-quick time, and having advance clarity on the decision-making and delegation schema so they can utilise it swiftly and under duress.
A crisis simulation also requires that the board and the executive team make judgments about trade-offs and address realistic operational consequences.
Regardless of how well or badly the board handles the simulation, the facilitator would conduct a post-simulation cross-functional debrief. It can be uncomfortable, but it is also vital for identifying organisational breaking points, weaknesses and strengths not just in the governance mechanisms but also in the cultural foundations.
The simulation and debrief can reveal, for instance, if the board relies too much on one narrative without sufficient verification, or how things are escalated in the business, or whether crisis authority and decision-making lines are defined, or whether succession contingencies were in place. It can also shine a light on aspects such as media relations, documentation discipline or lack of it, and the true characters of the board and the executive team.
All of this provides vital inputs into the board’s approach to building organisational resilience to shocks and a culture that supports that resilience.
A serious board would document the learnings and actions arising from a board simulation and follow through on them. A facilitator with board and crisis experience can help with those conversations and their conversion into necessary actions.
Board simulations work because they not only make a board think of the unthinkable but also make the board pull out all the stops on their imagination, their courage, their organisational knowledge, and above all their ability to keep stakeholder focus under duress.
Like all muscle-building, one drill conducted once will not give your organisation the heft needed to ensure the organisation can continue functioning when faced with a real challenge.
Do it once, do it again.
This article first appeared in Management Today on 26 May 2026 and is republished here with permission.
