Workshop material
Scenario sessions
Twenty five situations to put in front of your team and work through before one of them actually happens.
Reading about resilience changes very little. Sitting in a room with the people you work with, being handed a plausible disaster, and discovering nobody knows who would make the call is what changes things.
That is what the scenario cards are for. Each one describes a situation in enough detail to feel real, then asks the questions the situation would ask you.
Draw a card Printable deck (PDF) Facilitator's guide
What is in the deck
Every card is tagged with the settings it translates to and how hard the discussion tends to be, so you can pick for the room in front of you.
Operational. The sudden disappearance. The security incident with the signing keys nobody else holds. The system nobody understands. The sole signatory whose payroll runs on Thursday. The safeguarding lead who left on Friday.
Governance, legal and finance. The founder chief executive who is the charity in the eyes of funders. The chair whose term ends with no successor. The reorganisation that dissolves the team and not the product. The hostile fork. The succession planning that never quite happens.
People and community. The burnout announcement. The cascade failure where you lose three people in three weeks. The account relationships walking to a competitor. The founder who stepped back and is still here. The successor who does not feel ready.
How to run a session
- Split into groups of three or four
- Give each group a card, or let them draw one
- Ten minutes on the questions, with someone writing down what nobody could answer
- Share back across the room
- Turn the gaps into actual documented procedures, which is the part everyone skips
It works solo too. Pick the scenario that makes you most uncomfortable and answer it properly.
Three ways to use them
The card tool draws a scenario at random, filtered to the kind of organisation you are, and gives you somewhere to write down what nobody could answer.
The printed deck is A4, two A5 cards per sheet, with a cover card carrying the instructions. For a room, paper beats a screen.
The full document has all twenty five scenarios to read straight through.
If you are running the session rather than sitting in it, start with the facilitator's guide, or have one facilitated.
Bring your own
The best scenarios are the ones from your own near misses. What almost went wrong. What keeps you awake. What you watched happen to somebody else's project.
If you write one, contribute it back and it goes in the deck.