How to be a great host

Everything that follows assumes one thing: you, the host, are actively shaping the experience. The simulation engine, the dashboard, the players, the screens, the inject queue — all of it is there to be driven by a thinking facilitator. A great hosted session has the host’s fingerprints all over it, from peacetime preparation through to the closing debrief.

The remaining steps walk through the levers you have — first on the flexibility side (the scenario, the slides, the training materials), then on the live control side (the dashboard, the red and support teams, the messaging system, the tactics you choose to deploy in the moment).

If anything in the generated scenario doesn’t fit your client’s reality, don’t feel constrained by it. Download the scenario XLSX from the prepare page, edit it to your needs and re-upload — the generator gives you a strong starting point, but you are the subject-matter expert in the room.

Things hosts commonly tweak:

• Extra injects timed to land at the exact pressure points your client team needs to feel.
• Links to video news bulletins (real or staged) so the screen catches up with a fictional outside world.
• Role-specific nuances — a CFO who is six months from retirement, a CISO three weeks into the job, a chair under FT scrutiny.
• Local-language proper nouns, regulator names, brand names that match the client’s actual operating environment.

If you are at all concerned about a particular tutorial slide — maybe it doesn’t match the way you teach, or doesn’t land for the audience you have in the room — you can hide individual slides on an individual-slide basis. Open the Academy under Training Slides, pick the incident type and part, and toggle each slide between Use and Hide.

Preferences save against your whole membership, so every scenario anyone in your organisation runs for that incident type will respect the same choices. It’s the cheapest way to make the standard deck feel like your deck.

On the prepare page you can opt to use the provided IncidentResponse.App training materials — videos, quizzes, slides — or your own, or both. Choose per part:

• Provided only — fastest to run; the standard library is tuned to each incident type.
• Your own only — use the platform purely as the simulation engine and run your own teaching materials around it.
• Both — the most powerful option. Use the provided materials as a baseline, layer your own examples and war stories on top.

Quizzes are auto-generated and specific to each scenario, so you rarely need to substitute them — but the videos and slides can be swapped for your own URLs with a couple of clicks.

Above all else, as host you have full control of the session. Don’t leave the red team and support team on auto. Recruit members of your team — or trusted colleagues from your network — to actively play these roles:

• Red team — the adversary. A live human typing ransom notes, breach claims and journalist enquiries pressures the exec team in a way no automated inject can match.
• Support team — external experts (forensics, KC / outside counsel, PR, insurer, regulator liaison). Played live, they can challenge the exec team’s assumptions and force quality of evidence.

When the red team and support team are actively played, the exec team experiences the scenario as a real crisis — with cross-fire, conflicting advice, and human voices on the other end of every decision. That is where transformative training happens.

The host dashboard is your command surface. Use every part of it:

• Drag the sentiment, disruption, exposure and containment sliders to reflect what’s actually happening in the room — the players see the change land on their Live Impact rail.
• Engage with the messaging system directly — fire individual alerts at named players, drop a journalist enquiry into the press channel, send a regulator letter to the CLO.
• Use the inject queue as a director’s cut — fire the next inject early when the room is sprinting, delay it when they need time to breathe, skip past quiet stretches with the time controls.
• Pause for tabletop discussion; speed up when the clock is the point; rewind your thinking out loud when the team has gone down a blind alley.

A great host is constantly making small adjustments — the room should feel like it’s being staged in real time, because it is. See How to host and play a scenario for the mechanics of the dashboard itself.

The most memorable moments in a hosted session come from disrupting comfort. Don’t just run the scenario as written — deploy tactics that force participants out of their default stance:

• Swap executive roles mid-scenario — ask the CEO to take the CISO’s seat for Part Two, or have the CFO trade with the CLO. Experiencing what it’s like in other people’s shoes builds empathy and surfaces hidden assumptions about who owns what.
• Land a counter-intuitive inject — surface a regulator letter when the team thinks they have containment; drop a positive analyst note when the room is despairing. Resilience comes from being uncomfortable in both directions.
• Withhold information deliberately — refuse to confirm or deny a key fact for ten minutes. Watch which executives keep moving without certainty and which freeze. Both are valuable to discuss in the debrief.
• Promote a quiet voice — direct an inject at the most junior person in the room and watch the team’s dynamic shift. The platform is a stage; the casting is yours to set.