Writing effective scenarios
The prospect of scenario writing doesn't need to be daunting! Our approach focuses less on creativity and inspiration and more on good research and procedure.
Great scenarios must do the following:
1. Meet a training goal
This is what writers would call the "premise", but in an exercise this is the primary thing you want learners to understand. This is could to be specific information or procedures that you want the training audience to use or remember, or qualitative lessons about their behaviour, or the development of important skills like collaboration and communication under stress.
2. Be engaging
The scenario must be relevant to the training audience, otherwise they may switch off and not engage. Scenarios that show players the consequences of their actions/inaction demonstrate how and why decisions are meaningful.
Emotion is the key to memorability. Using stories to convey meaning is a more effective way to deliver training. In crisis exercises, you can provoke emotion with surprise and challenge. There can be a lot of ambiguous and conflicting information in a crisis - you could imitate this to raise the challenge.
The diagram below visualises how different psychological, cognitive, and operational factors interrelate in developing crisis training effectiveness. Consider the skills you want to develop (top row) and then the rows beneath each skill show the factors or challenges that build or test those skills.
For example:
Under Stress, the factors are scarcity, complexity, and conflict – things like limited time, uncertainty, or competing stakeholders.
Under Emotion, they are relevance, resonance, and surprise – emotional triggers that shape how people react.
Under Adaptability, they include problem solving, coordination, and change of direction – ways of staying flexible under pressure.
3. Take the minimum amount of time and cost to create
Work with existing assets or AI-generated ones. Ensure that your scenario only lasts as long as is necessary to accomplish training objectives and maintain player engagement.
How to get started
The process below gives you a step-by-step method for getting started on writing effective scenarios:
Decide on your training objectives
The training objective is what you want to achieve with the scenario. Once established, you can then identify the key player decisions and actions that will achieve those objectives. Decisions drive an interactive experience and reveal the consequences of player action (or inaction).
To get started, answer these questions:
Who are your participants?
What do your participants need to learn, test, or experience?
Based on the training audience and objectives of your scenario, make sure to choose a realistic trigger or inciting incident e.g. ransomware, protest, flood.
Define the player roles
You need to know your training audience - is it the business continuity team or the crisis management team? Is the C-suite or the operational team? This makes a big difference in how the exercise will be developed.
Beyond that you might consider giving players different team roles to create opportunities for “information asymmetry”. This is where players receive different information which can incite discussion and conflict. This also allows testing for many types of cognitive bias that arise in teams.
A role should be determined by who has privileged access to information or has responsibility for a specialist task.
Create a hierarchy of events, incidents, injects and decisions
Events are the major tentpoles of the scenario that provide the structure from start to finish. Incidents are the consequences of the events.
Event: e.g. a hurricane warning
Incident: e.g. traffic jams/stockpiling of food
Inject: content you will publish that informs the player how the world is changing
Identify the stakeholders and create personas
Every crisis has stakeholders. Each has a point of view and their own agendas.
A stakeholder could be generic such as "Minister for the Environment", but you must then turn these stakeholders into specific personas like "John Steel, Secretary General of the ITM".
Personas have names, personalities and, importantly, grudges to bare. You might consider working with archetypes too. For example:
The Boss: someone players can report their decisions to
The Mentor: someone to guide players
Create content for the injects
Content will be published by a persona in a channel.
The choice of channel should be determined by either:
What would be used in real life
What makes the exercise engaging
What response is required from the player
E.g. TV news could go to the TV channel or to YouTube, or if it's breaking news, a media pop up could be more impactful. Requests for qualitative answers are best handled by email, while phone calls are great for immediacy and emotional impact, for instance.
Check and revise the timing of injects
Players should have either have just enough or slightly too little time to assess (and discuss/share) all the information you provide.
Keep content flowing like a ticking heartbeat so that the scenario feels alive. Any calm should be followed by a storm. This approach will maintain engagement and is more likely to reveal how the player will react under pressure in a real crisis.
Use Assistants
Use AXS and Sidekick to develop your scenario once you've completed steps 1 and 2 (defining the training objectives and what you want to achieve).
Canvas in AXS
In AXS, Canvas is your AI-assisted workspace for scenario design. It offers a bird's eye view of your training exercise and structures the creation process around its most important components:
Sidekick
Use Sidekick to build out your scenario using AI, straight from the Editor. There are a variety of assistants available that can help you create scenarios:
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