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I have one exercise design rule that has cost me contracts.When the plan goes quiet, the room gets to go quiet too.Contr...
08/04/2026

I have one exercise design rule that has cost me contracts.

When the plan goes quiet, the room gets to go quiet too.

Controllers hate that silence. Sponsors hate it more. Somebody always wants to push the next inject so nobody looks stuck, and if you do that, you just erased the finding everyone paid for.

So I train controllers to hold. Let the players open the plan and find nothing. Let them sit in it.

That quiet is the deliverable.

The hole surfaces now, in a conference room, or it surfaces at 0214 during a real activation. One of those is a lot cheaper.

HSEEP already tells you how to build exercises that reveal capability. The method has been written down for years. What's scarce is the nerve to let it run when the room gets uncomfortable.

If you're vetting a vendor, ask whether they've ever let a room stay stuck. Ask what it cost them.

If the answer is no, they've been designing exercises to be passed.

A corrective action gets closed because somebody edited a document.David keeps finding this in Improvement Plans. Findin...
08/03/2026

A corrective action gets closed because somebody edited a document.

David keeps finding this in Improvement Plans. Finding identified, action assigned, tracked on paper. Next exercise cycle it's checked off complete. The plan text got revised. That's all that actually changed.

He reviewed one program where the same finding showed up three cycles in a row. Closed every time.

So he builds IPs around one rule: every corrective action carries an evidence requirement before it can close.

1. A named person and a date. Anything assigned to "the coalition" gets verified by nobody.

2. An evidence line that describes a demonstration. Something like "the fallback protocol was run in a tabletop and the coalition executed it under scenario conditions." A document revision doesn't satisfy the line.

3. The verifying exercise scheduled into the grant cycle before the audit date. After the audit it just never happens. He's not sure anyone decides that on purpose, it just quietly falls off.

Built that way, the Improvement Plan turns into a calendar of tests the coalition committed to passing.

If the closure column says "plan updated," the finding is still open.

08/02/2026

You can hear the exact spot where a plan stops being real.

Ask a planner to walk their plan out loud, no reading, just talk it through.

The sections they've actually worked come out with names in them. Who calls the duty officer. Which channel. Where the trailer keys live.

Then they hit a certain section and the voice changes.

"Under those conditions, we would coordinate with our regional partners to identify appropriate resources."

Nobody named. No mechanism. No verb a person on shift could act on at 0214.

That sentence structure isn't a writing style problem. Passive voice with an unnamed actor is what it sounds like when a section was built to satisfy a reviewer instead of guide the next person who has to move.

The plan still says what the agency is responsible for. It just quietly stopped telling anyone what to do next.

And the planner usually isn't hiding anything. They absorbed that language from templates that were already written that way. Competent people handing down a bad convention.

If a program wants a cheap diagnostic, this is it. Read the plan aloud, mark every spot where the actors go unnamed, and treat those marks as the sections that haven't been earned yet.

The register shift is data. It maps the boundary of what the program can actually do before an incident maps it for them.

We killed the incident commander's phone mid-exercise. Twelve minutes of confusion followed.One inject. Battery dead, ha...
08/01/2026

We killed the incident commander's phone mid-exercise. Twelve minutes of confusion followed.

One inject. Battery dead, hand it over, you're offline now.

The plan listed three backup channels. On paper it looked solid, and honestly, we half expected the room to shrug and move on.

They didn't.

Twelve minutes before anyone reached the section chiefs through something that wasn't that phone.

Here's what the debrief surfaced: two of the three backups routed through the same person. The one holding the dead phone. Three labels on the page, one dependency underneath.

We used to think a redundancy plan that passed review was a redundancy plan that worked. Wrote a few that way ourselves, years back. That belief didn't survive the first real activation where the primary channel went quiet and the backup turned out to live in the same pocket.

If a plan hasn't had its main channel taken away on purpose, nobody actually knows what the backups do.

The twelve minutes weren't the failure. They were the product. That's what the exercise was for.

The corrective action said "improve coordination." Nobody could act on that.David reads a lot of after-action reports th...
07/31/2026

The corrective action said "improve coordination." Nobody could act on that.

David reads a lot of after-action reports that just retell the exercise. Hour by hour, who called who, where the radios got messy. Accurate, and useless six months later.

He writes findings a different way. Against the assumption that failed.

Four parts:

1. The plan assumed X.

2. Under scenario conditions, X did not hold, because Y.

3. The consequence was Z.

4. The corrective action is A. Assigned to a name, with a date.

Same exercise. Completely different finding.

The narrative version produces a symptom. "Hospital comms broke down during the surge." Fine, but the fix that falls out of that is some flavor of improve coordination, which either can't be done at all or needs a structural change the finding never names.

The assumption version produces something a specific person can close by March.

He's watched a truthful finding get softened before publication, then stood in the same failure a year later. The soft language never obligated anyone to change anything.

If a finding can't be assigned, dated, and closed, it probably wasn't finished.

If an exercise objective can't fail, the exercise can't teach anything.Read the objectives in most exercise RFPs. Someth...
07/30/2026

If an exercise objective can't fail, the exercise can't teach anything.

Read the objectives in most exercise RFPs. Something like "test the ability of the coalition to coordinate a multi-facility response consistent with HPP Capability 2."

That objective got approved because it maps to doctrine. Reviewers like it. The grant closes clean.

But HPP Capability 2 isn't a thing that can pass or fail. It's a category. A label on territory.

So the event built on it can only confirm what everyone already assumed. The design was finished before design even started.

Now write it against the actual assumption sitting inside the plan: "test whether the coalition's medical surge coordination structure holds when both primary receiving facilities go offline at the same time from a shared infrastructure dependency."

That one can come back false. There's a real claim in it.

And once the objective is a claim, everything downstream changes shape. The scenario has to create that stress. The facilitators have to let it play out. The after-action has to say what held and what didn't.

One choice, made before anyone builds anything, decides whether the event teaches or just passes.

If a planner is writing objectives right now, one question is worth asking of each: what would this look like if it failed? No answer to that, no information in the objective yet.

A transfer plan listed two receiving hospitals. It really had zero.Looked fine in review. Primary receiving facility, al...
07/29/2026

A transfer plan listed two receiving hospitals. It really had zero.

Looked fine in review. Primary receiving facility, alternate receiving facility, signed agreements for both. Any auditor would pass it.

Then a consultant sat with it during an exercise design and asked one question. What conditions would actually trigger the transfer?

Regional hazard. That was the answer. Something big enough that the sending hospital can't hold the patient.

Both receiving facilities sat in the same region. Same water system, same fuel deliveries, actually same medical gas supplier too, which nobody had checked.

So the exact event that triggers the protocol is the event that takes both destinations offline at the same time. The plan works beautifully on every day it isn't needed.

The protocol wasn't wrong on paper. It just assumed the receiving end stays healthy while the sending end fails, and a regional hazard doesn't honor that assumption.

A backup that shares a dependency with the primary is one option wearing the costume of two.

If a plan has an alternate facility, it might be worth an afternoon tracing what both buildings quietly share. Water, power, staff who live in the same flood zone.

That afternoon is cheap. Finding out at 0200 during an activation is the other price.

I can hear the exact moment a coalition plan goes quiet.It happens when a coordinator walks me through it out loud.The f...
07/28/2026

I can hear the exact moment a coalition plan goes quiet.

It happens when a coordinator walks me through it out loud.

The first part is full of names. Sarah at Region Four. Marcus at the hospital across the street. Real people, real phone numbers, real history.

Then somewhere around the second or third contingency, the names stop. It becomes "the coalition will support" and "regional partners will coordinate."

So I ask one question. If Sarah's on vacation and Marcus is managing his own surge, who do you call?

Long pause.

That pause is the actual plan. Everything before it was memory, not structure.

The honest fix isn't more paperwork. Well, it is paper, but a specific kind. Sit down and write out the second call for each named person, then the conditions where that second call also fails. Takes an afternoon. Most coordinators I talk to already know where their plan goes quiet, they just haven't written it down where someone can see it.

The day you need Sarah is probably the same day Region Four needs her too. That's the condition worth planning against.

I'd rather flag that seam at delivery than have someone find it at 2am during an activation.

A plan usually stops answering before anyone in the room can see it break.An exercise tends to surface two failure point...
07/27/2026

A plan usually stops answering before anyone in the room can see it break.

An exercise tends to surface two failure points, and only one of them gets written up.

The visible one. An inject lands, the section can't answer it, the room watches it happen.

The earlier one is quieter.

It's the second inside the person working the plan when the document stops talking back. They keep reading, but nothing on the page fits the situation anymore. The rest of the room hasn't caught it yet. They have.

Those two points are not always the same minute. Sometimes they're not even close.

The after-action report captures the first one. The actual growth happens at the second.

Which is probably why walking a plan slowly matters more than running it fast. If a drill moves quick enough that the person never sits inside that quiet second, the section looks rehearsed and stays untested. Filed as complete anyway.

The visible failure is mostly a receipt. Proof of something the person already registered a few minutes earlier, if the exercise gave them room to register it.

Worth asking of the next drill: is it built to produce a finding, or built to let someone hear their own plan go silent early enough to do something about it?

Most MSELs I review are last year's exercise with the names swapped.Same injects, same timing. Somebody changed the coun...
07/26/2026

Most MSELs I review are last year's exercise with the names swapped.

Same injects, same timing. Somebody changed the county and the hospital and called it design.

That version runs fine, honestly. The exercise moves, the controllers stay busy, the report writes itself.

And it teaches almost nothing, because none of the injects were aimed at anything.

An MSEL is an engineering document. Each inject should deliver stress at a decision point where this specific plan makes an assumption nobody has tested.

Say the plan assumes an alternate care site stands up in six hours. Okay. Then somebody needs to build the inject that makes that assumption carry weight at hour four, while two other things are already going sideways.

Doing that means reading the plan closely enough to find where it's guessing. That's slow, unglamorous work, and there's no template for it because the assumptions live in that plan and nowhere else.

I get why the copy-forward version wins. It's three weeks out, the old file is right there, and the calendar doesn't care.

But the targeting is the part that produces the learning. Skip it and the weak points stay exactly where they were, and now they've got a clean exercise report sitting on top of them.

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