Evocatus

17/09/2026

Erik Hollnagel offered four potentials required for resilient performance: an organisation needs to be able to respond to what is happening, monitor what is developing, anticipate what could happen, and learn from what has happened.

We would argue that only one of the four can be practised directly. An exercise practises a response. But the other three potentials will matter within that exercise as elements of developing competence. The team learns to monitor the situation to look for indicators and warnings of things going right or wrong; it learns to anticipate based on those weak signals, developing contingency plans against potential impacts; and it learns because After Action Review turns the experience into knowledge and improved performance on the next iteration.

There is one place our reading departs from his. Hollnagel separates monitoring, the near term, from anticipating, the further future. We treat horizon scanning as monitoring in order to anticipate: you look for the indicators and warnings precisely so that you have something concrete to think about. Anticipation in isolation, focussing effort on trying to predict the precise threats, in order to build specific contingency plans ahead of time, makes an organisation brittle, not more resilient. That was Aaron Wildavsky's argument forty years ago, and we think he was right.

How we use tabletop exercises to develop all four potentials is the focus of this month's article on our website.

Which of the four does your team practise least?

15/09/2026

Three years after an incident struck, the resulting contingency plan is fully up to date. In the wake of the disaster, the plan has been reviewed against a clear schedule and the names in it are bang up to date. But nobody named has practised their part in the plan, given the churn over the last few years. A detailed plan written in the raw emotion of having suffered real impact is now just a document to be managed.

This is the trap that contingency planning can easily fall into. Nobody decides to let the capability go, but over time it erodes, slipping further down the list of priorities, one reasonable postponement after another, with the review cycle keeping the paperwork tidy, maintaining confidence and giving no signal that anything is wrong. In his work on investigating systems failure, Sidney Dekker calls the wider pattern a drift into failure. In contingency planning it looks more like erosion.

A document records what the organisation intends. Whether the people named in it can decide together, on incomplete information, against the clock, with someone actively trying to push them off balance, is only ever checked through a rehearsal. This is one application of a tabletop exercise, allowing the team to learn the plan and their part in it, alongside developing them as an actual team.

This month's article on our website sets out what contingency planning is, where it goes wrong, and what a good tabletop exercise looks like.

When did the people named in your plan last practise it?

https://www.evocatus.co.uk/articles/contingency-planning-with-tabletop-exercises/

10/09/2026

A big thank you to everyone who signed up to our newsletter this week.

The list is small, which is rather the point, and it already covers a broader range of fields than we could have hoped: defence personnel, both uniformed and civilian, security and resilience planners across blue light, local government and private sectors, world-class wargamers on both sides of the Atlantic, academics, a handful of independent consultancies we admire, and one gin distillery!

Issue one goes out next week. If you meant to sign up but didn't, the form is still here: https://evocatus.co.uk/newsletter/

Our monthly note on scenario work, decision-making under pressure and organisational learning, written by Ant Sharman. No cookies, no tracking, no sharing.

08/09/2026

We've decided to start publishing a newsletter. Rather than just pushing out our thoughts onto the website and social media and trusting the various algorithms to get them in front of people who might be interested, we want to take back a little agency.

Initially, we'll send it monthly, reviewing some of the thinking we've been doing and sharing what we're reading, but in time we hope to develop it into something with a bit more actual news, of what we've done and what we've learned.

The first issue goes out in the middle of September, with a look at horizon scanning.

If you'd like to be an early adopter, please come and sign up here: https://evocatus.co.uk/newsletter/

Our monthly note on scenario work, decision-making under pressure and organisational learning, written by Ant Sharman. No cookies, no tracking, no sharing.

03/09/2026

On 1 September 1939, two days before war was declared, Britain began moving its children out of the cities. Operation Pied Piper had been in planning since 1938 and rehearsed in the schools through the last week of August. In three days it moved a million and a half people.

The bits that went wrong were the bits that had been assumed, and not rehearsed. Nobody had really thought about the scene a billeting officer would be faced with when the train arrived, or how families would react if the expected bombing did not start the moment war broke out.

To the government, Pied Piper looked much like the familiar challenge of moving troops around the country. While the management of train timetables was much the same in both cases, the assumption that dispersing children to suitable accommodation was much like billeting soldiers turned out, unsurprisingly, to be flawed.

Which assumptions do you not really know you've made in your contingency plans? If you're not sure, we can help you run a proper rehearsal.

01/09/2026

Today is the first day of meteorological autumn. Throughout military history, right up to the current day, the change in the seasons has made decisions for commanders. There have always been times of year when armies are harder to sustain and move, and today the wrong kind of precipitation is more effective than darkness at degrading sensors.

But there is always the temptation to take risk; some of the finest generals have been unpicked by the winter. As a result, campaign planners still have one eye on the weather at this time of year.

The habit is worth borrowing. An arbitrary date at the end of summer is a natural point to pause and take stock. Plans and strategies written back in the spring have been in train all summer, with the holidays leaving fewer people in the office to stay on top of the detail. And between the increasingly clear risks presented by climate change and adversaries abroad, anybody hoping for certainty is kidding themselves. The beginning of September is the moment to check how the summer has gone and work out how to thrive through the coming winter.

Marking the turn can take as little as half an hour with your team. With your plans in front of you, ask what has changed over the summer to push them over their expiry date?

27/08/2026

"Why can't we just do all this virtually, over Teams?"

A fair question, particularly given the complexity and distributed experience simulations and virtual wargaming can allow.

The exercises and wargames we run are deeply human activities, simulating the need for communication, compromise, collaboration and coordination; a strong performance requires working out not only what to do, but also how to achieve it. There is a host of supporting tech that we can and do draw on, but ultimately, our focus is on bringing people together, challenging them as a team and then helping them to identify how to perform better next time.

Based on Kolb's model of experiential learning, our design approach places an emphasis on learning through effective reflection and conceptualisation, not just on delivering an experience. Key to this is a facilitated After Action Review, but in-person events also provide much more opportunity for informal observation and insight, as participants chat over coffee and in the margins.

There is undeniably much that can be achieved on Teams, but we'll always choose to deliver our services in person.

25/08/2026

Last week, we hosted a team from Bournemouth University Disaster Management Centre at our HQ on Dorset Innovation Park, to help provide support for YingLan Liang's postgraduate research into using gaming as a Learning and Development tool.

As ever, the opportunity to talk to open-minded people with real-world experience of working to build resilience in communities and respond to emergencies was genuinely rewarding, and signposted a host of applications for gaming and scenario-based exercises. The perennial concern that adults often struggle to give themselves permission to play games or roll dice for fear of appearing childish came up, as did the design choices around "winning" and "losing" as a competition, set against more nuanced drivers, such as collaboration and compromise.

If you have responsibilities in civil resilience, humanitarian response or emergency planning, and you have never seen how we can turn a map, some counters and a little uncertainty into a valuable exercise, do arrange to come and see us. We are always happy to host a visit!

20/08/2026

Our understanding of a given situation goes stale over time. When we plan, though, we are naturally optimistic that our assumptions have a long shelf life; only when the plan gets exercised or executed does that outdated understanding come to light.

Here is a check you can run with your own team in half an hour. No external facilitation or away day required.

• Everyone writes down the five assumptions they think your current plan rests on. Not the risks on the register, but the things everyone expects to work.

• Date each one. When was it last tested against anything more concrete than a conversation?

• For each assumption, name the person who would notice first if it stopped being true, then check they have a route to tell you and would know when they needed to.

• Take the oldest assumption on the list and have the team argue against it for ten minutes. Not to win, but to explore what would have to have changed for it to no longer be true.

• Write down what you would need to see to change your mind. If nothing would, you are not making an assumption. An assumption can be proved wrong; faith, hope and belief cannot, which is precisely what makes them dangerous to build a plan on.

Anything still standing at the end is a suitable foundation for the plan. Anything that falls over was rotten, and was going to break later, in the real world where customers and regulators are watching.

https://www.evocatus.co.uk/articles/horizon-scanning/

19/08/2026

As the first bit of rain in weeks reminds us that Dorset’s hot summer can’t go on for ever, this is your early reminder that Remembrance season sneaks up on us every Autumn.

If you have an LS&GC or a WSM to add to your rack, now is the time to get them in to us if you want to get ahead of the annual rush!