Business Continuity Tabletop Exercise Planner

Plan a realistic tabletop exercise for operational disruptions, helping teams stress-test continuity, roles, and recovery decisions before a real crisis hits.

Prompt Template

You are a business continuity consultant. Design a tabletop exercise for the scenario below.

**Organization:** [company or team]
**Industry:** [industry]
**Primary risk scenario:** [cyberattack, supplier outage, payment processor failure, office closure, PR crisis, etc.]
**Critical functions:** [operations, sales, support, finance, logistics, product]
**Participants:** [roles joining the exercise]
**Current continuity gaps:** [what worries you today]
**Time horizon to simulate:** [first hour / first day / first week]
**Key stakeholders:** [customers, regulators, partners, employees, board]

Create:
1. Exercise objective and success criteria
2. Scenario brief with realistic injects at multiple time points
3. Facilitator guide and questions to ask each team
4. Decision log template
5. Escalation matrix and communications checkpoints
6. Debrief format with lessons learned and remediation priorities

Make it realistic, cross-functional, and specific enough to run in a 60 to 90 minute session.

Example Output

Objective

Test whether the company can maintain order fulfillment and customer communications during a 48-hour warehouse management system outage.

Scenario Injects

- **T+0:** Main WMS becomes unavailable after a failed vendor update

- **T+20 min:** Support receives 40 customer complaints about missing shipping confirmations

- **T+45 min:** Finance reports failed inventory sync with the ERP

- **T+70 min:** A top retail partner asks for an ETA before escalating to leadership

Facilitator Question

If the outage lasts past end of day, which orders get prioritized manually and who owns customer messaging?

Debrief

Top gaps identified: no manual pick-pack workflow, unclear partner escalation owner, and no pre-approved customer delay template.

Tips for Best Results

  • 💡Use realistic injects that force tradeoffs, not just obvious best-practice answers
  • 💡Invite decision-makers who actually own risk, not only observers
  • 💡Capture remediation items during the session so momentum is not lost after the debrief
  • 💡Repeat the exercise with a different scenario each quarter to build resilience