Simulated crisis tabletop exercises are like a flu shot: The vaccine won’t prevent the illness one-hundred percent of the time, but if you do get the flu, the vaccine will greatly reduce the illness’ severity and bring you back to health more quickly.

The potential illness in your organization is, of course, a crisis. Natural disaster or human-caused, the crisis brings pain and suffering to your organization and could even spell its demise. The tabletop exercise is a carefully orchestrated practice session where your crisis response team is assembled to respond to a realistically simulated crisis scenario — a very prudent vaccine. The scenario could be anything that could harm your organization’s reputation and its ability to function, from a natural disaster or accident to human-caused crises such as a security breach, terror attack or internally perpetrated wrongdoing.

The tabletop exercise provides the most efficient way to test and improve the effectiveness of your organization’s crisis plan and your crisis response team. Professional analysis of the exercise provides the crucial information you need to determine how well your organization would actually respond and continue functioning in a crisis, as well as how your plan and response team could be improved.

…

http://www.preparedex.com/5-benefits-conducting-tabletop-exercises/