There’s an old line in sports that coaches repeat until it loses all meaning: you play the way you practice. Like most things coaches say, it’s true — and like most true things, people hear it without really hearing it.
I’ve watched it happen on football fields and I’ve watched it happen in corporate boardrooms, and the mechanism is exactly the same. A team that practices half-speed will play half-speed. A team that skips reps will fumble the handoff. And an organization that writes an emergency response plan but never exercises it will discover, on the worst day of its existence, that the plan is just paper.
The plan on the shelf
Most companies I work with have a plan. Some of them are quite good — thorough, well-organized, clearly written. They check the box. They satisfy the auditor. They sit in a binder or a shared drive, and they give everyone a comforting sense that things have been thought through.
And then something happens.
What I’ve learned over thirty years of responding to crises — real ones, not the simulated kind — is that the distance between having a plan and being prepared is enormous. It might be the most dangerous distance in emergency management, because it’s invisible. Everyone believes they’re ready. The plan says so.
But a plan is not muscle memory. A plan is not the feeling of having been in that room before, under pressure, making decisions with incomplete information while people are waiting for you to say something. That only comes from practice. FEMA understood this when they built the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program. The entire framework rests on a simple premise: you don’t know whether your plan works until you’ve tested it. And testing it once isn’t enough — you have to do it regularly, because people change roles, systems get updated, and the assumptions you made eighteen months ago quietly stop being true.
The research backs this up in ways that should make anyone uncomfortable. Studies of real disaster responses — going back decades — find the same failures appearing over and over: fractured command structures, communication breakdowns, delayed resource deployment. Not because people didn’t have plans. Because they hadn’t practiced them.
Practice is not a checkbox
There’s a version of exercising that doesn’t actually help. I’ve seen it plenty of times. Somebody schedules a tabletop, everyone shows up, the scenario unfolds in a polite and orderly fashion, people nod and take notes, and at the end someone says “that went well.” Everyone feels good. Nothing was learned.
That’s not practice. That’s theater.
A good exercise is uncomfortable. It surfaces the things you haven’t thought about. It puts people in positions where they have to make real decisions — not recite procedures from a manual, but actually choose between two imperfect options with a clock running. It reveals who knows their role and who has been assuming someone else would handle it.
The best exercises I’ve been part of are the ones where something goes sideways — where the scenario takes a turn nobody planned for, and the team has to adapt. Because that’s what happens in a real crisis. Every single time. The scenario you planned for and the scenario you get are never the same. The question is whether your people have enough reps, enough practice in thinking on their feet, that they can adjust without falling apart.
In the emergency management world, there’s a phrase that captures it well: people don’t rise to the level of the crisis — they fall to the level of their training. I’ve seen that play out more times than I can count.
Your service provider is not your plan
Here’s where it gets more complicated, and where I see companies make a mistake that’s understandable but costly.
Many organizations in high-risk industries — transportation, energy, entertainment, higher education — recognize that they need outside expertise for crisis response. They don’t have the internal staff or the specialized knowledge to handle a mass casualty event or a large-scale disaster on their own. So they do the smart thing: they find a service provider. They sign a contract. They put the vendor’s number in the plan.
And then they think they’re done.
I understand the instinct. You’ve identified the gap, you’ve found qualified people to fill it, and you’ve put the arrangement in writing. That feels like preparation. But signing a contract with a crisis response vendor is not the same as being prepared, any more than hiring a quarterback is the same as winning a game. You still have to practice together.
The reason is simple, and it’s the same reason that matters in every part of this discussion: when the phone rings at two in the morning, you need to already know how this is going to work. Not in theory. Not on paper. In practice. Which decisions are yours and which are your service provider’s? Where does your responsibility end and theirs begin? Who talks to the families? Who talks to the media? Who talks to the regulators? What happens when those three groups need different things at the same time?
These questions have answers, but the answers aren’t generic. They’re specific to your organization, your culture, your leadership, and your legal and regulatory environment. And they can only be worked out in advance, through joint training and joint exercises, with real people sitting in the same room working through real scenarios.
You cannot outsource judgment
This is the part that surprises people. I’ve had executives say to me, in so many words: “We’re paying you to handle this. Why do we need to be involved?”
Because you can’t outsource the decisions that define your company.
A crisis response partner — a good one — brings expertise, experience, staffing, logistics, and a calm presence in the middle of chaos. What they cannot bring is your authority. They can’t decide how much your company is going to spend. They can’t decide what your CEO is going to say on camera. They can’t decide whether to ground your fleet, shut down your operations, or change your procedures. They can’t make the call about what information to share with families and when.
Those are your decisions. They involve your money, your reputation, your people, and your legal exposure. And they have to be made fast, often with limited information, in an environment where every hour matters. If the first time your leadership team thinks about those decisions is the day they have to make them, you are in trouble.
A good partner will tell you this. A good partner wants to exercise with you, because they know that the relationship they build during a tabletop at ten in the morning is the relationship that holds at three in the morning when everything is real. They know that the trust, the shorthand, the shared understanding of who does what — all of that is built in practice, not in contracts.
The cost of not practicing
I won’t name specific companies or events. But I will tell you what I’ve seen when organizations skip this step.
I’ve seen response teams show up to an operations center and spend the first three hours figuring out who’s in charge. I’ve seen companies and their partners working at cross purposes because nobody ever defined the handoff points. I’ve seen decisions delayed by hours — hours that mattered to families — because a leadership team was encountering questions for the first time that they should have wrestled with in an exercise six months earlier.
And I’ve seen the opposite. I’ve seen organizations where the plan kicked in like muscle memory — where people moved to their positions, picked up the phone, and started executing, because they’d done it before. Not for real, but close enough that the motions were familiar. The fear was still there. The pressure was still there. But the confusion wasn’t, because they’d practiced it out of the system.
That’s the difference. Not whether you have a plan. Not whether you have a partner. Whether you’ve practiced — together, seriously, recently enough that it still means something.
Do the reps
If you have an emergency response plan and you haven’t exercised it in the last year, you don’t have a plan. You have a document. They are not the same thing.
If you have a crisis response partner and you haven’t trained together, you have a contract. You don’t have a relationship. And relationships are what hold up under pressure — contracts don’t.
The coaches had it right. You play the way you practice. And if you don’t practice at all, you’re not going to like the way you play.