Facilitator's guide

How to run a scenario session, written so that somebody who has never done it before can pick this up and run one well.

You do not need to be an expert in succession planning to facilitate this. You need to keep time, ask a couple of follow up questions, and stop people solving the wrong problem. The material does the rest.

What the session is for

Reading about resilience changes very little. Sitting in a room with the people you actually work with, being handed a plausible disaster, and discovering that nobody knows who would make the call is what changes things.

So the goal is not good answers. The goal is a written list of the things nobody in the room could answer. That list is the output. Everything else is the means of producing it.

Say this at the start. People arrive expecting to be tested, and relax considerably once they understand that finding gaps is the point rather than a failure.

What you need

The scenario cards, printed and cut, or the card tool at beyondthebusfactor.org/scenarios
One sheet of paper per group, headed what we could not answer
A visible timer
Somewhere to write up themes where everyone can see

Nothing else. No laptops, no slides.

Choosing cards

Every card is tagged with the settings it fits and how hard the discussion tends to be. The dots are about the difficulty of the conversation, not the severity of the crisis.

For a mixed room, let groups draw at random. For a single team, choose deliberately:

Opening a session: a one dot card. The succession planning that never happens gets a rueful laugh and settles people quickly.
A team that thinks it is fine: The sudden disappearance or The system nobody understands. Both tend to end with somebody going very quiet.
A board or trustee group: The founder chief executive, The chair's term ends, The sole signatory.
After a real incident: avoid the card that resembles it. People re-litigate instead of thinking.

Give a group the hardest card only if you are confident they will not spend ten minutes arguing about whether the scenario is realistic.

Formats

Forty five minutes

The standard conference or team slot.

Time	What happens
0 to 5	Why you are here, and the point being the gaps rather than the answers
5 to 10	Split into groups of three or four. Hand out or draw cards
10 to 22	Groups work the questions. You circulate
22 to 35	Share back, sixty seconds per group, one insight each
35 to 43	Group the themes on the board together
43 to 45	Everyone writes down one thing they will do in the next thirty days

Ninety minutes

Two rounds, which is where it starts to get somewhere.

Run the forty five minute shape, then swap cards between groups and run a second round of twelve minutes with a different focus. Groups notice the second card is harder because they now know what to look for.

Use the extra time at the end for the part that usually gets cut: turning two or three gaps into named actions with an owner and a date. Without that, the session is entertainment.

Half day

Three rounds, one per category, and then work through the bus factor audit on your own organisation with the scenarios still fresh. This is the version that produces a plan rather than a list.

On your own

Pick the card that makes you most uncomfortable and answer the questions in writing. Writing matters. The gaps are invisible until you try to put them in a sentence.

Facilitating the discussion

Circulate, and stay out of it. Groups solve the problem faster if you are not standing over them. Listen from a distance for the group that has gone silent, which usually means they have found something real.

Watch for the three ways a group avoids the scenario.

Arguing with the premise. "We would never let that happen." Redirect once: "Take it as given. What then?" If it continues, they are protecting something, and that is worth noting.
Solving the technical problem. Engineers reach for the deployment question and stay there. Ask who is telling the customers.
Naming an absent colleague. Move it to the role. "If the person who does that is not there" rather than a name.

Ask the second question. Almost every group stops one level too early. Useful follow ups:

Who decides? Not who does the work, who has the authority
How long does that actually take, in hours
Who is not in this room who would need to be
How would you find out this had happened
What if this happened during the Christmas break

Protect the quiet person. The one who knows the real answer is often the most junior person present, and will not say it over a senior colleague. Ask them directly.

Sixty seconds per group. Hold that line, kindly. The value is in the pattern across groups, and long share backs eat it.

Ask for one thing only: what could you not answer? Not a summary of the scenario, which everyone can read.

Write each one up as you go. By the fourth group people start pointing out that theirs is the same as an earlier one, which is the moment the session turns from an exercise into a conversation about your organisation.

Closing

Group the gaps into three piles out loud:

We have never written this down. The cheapest to fix, and usually the largest pile.
Only one person can do this. Needs a second person and time to train them.
Nobody has the authority to decide. A governance problem wearing an operational costume, and the one people most want to leave in the room.

Then each person writes one action for the next thirty days. Specific, theirs, small enough to actually happen. "Document the deploy process" fails. "Watch Jo deploy on the 14th and write it up" works.

If you can, collect them. A follow up message in a month asking how people got on does more for follow through than anything you say on the day.

Afterwards

Send round the list of gaps within a day, while people still recognise their own words in it. Say who owns each pile. If nobody owns a pile, say that too, because it is the most useful thing the session found.

Then put the same session in the diary for six months' time. This works as a rhythm and barely works at all as an event.

A note on tone

Several of these scenarios involve illness, death, burnout and people leaving badly. Somebody in your room has lived through one of them, and possibly recently.

Say at the start that anyone can pass on a card or step out. Do not press a group that goes carefully around a subject. If a scenario lands too close to something real in your organisation, name it plainly rather than pretending the resemblance is a coincidence, and move to a different card.

Handled well, this is the session where people say the thing they have been carrying for a year. That is a good outcome, and it needs you to have made room for it.