Surviving Staff Gaps Webinar Live Crisis Simulation

43 minute video

Join this hands on crisis simulation with Battleground CEO Craig Goldberg, Head of Battleground UK Eli Goldberg and Director of Risk & Resilience Paul Minter for a fast paced, 1 hour interactive crisis management exercise focused on holiday staffing disruptions.

Surviving Staff Gaps: What a Live Crisis Simulation Taught 50 Resilience Professionals About Holiday Risk

By Eli Goldberg, Head of Battleground, UK & EU Battleground Knowledge Share | 11 June 2026

Earlier today we ran something a little different to your standard webinar. Instead of talking at people about holiday period risk, we put around 50 resilience professionals from the UK, Europe, the US, and Australia inside a live crisis simulation, and let them feel what it’s like when your plan’s primary people simply aren’t there.

The timing was deliberate. The UK and Europe are heading into summer holidays. Australia is heading into winter school holidays. Wherever you are in the world, the same problem is about to land on your desk: critical people on leave, thin rosters, and a plan that assumes everyone named in it will pick up the phone.

Spoiler: they won’t.

The scenario: Meridian Group

We dropped attendees into the Meridian Group, a fictitious retailer with 62 stores and multi million turnover, at the peak of the holiday season. Then, using the Battleground exercise platform, Craig and I hit them with a cascade of injects:

• An extreme heat warning for England and Wales, with temperatures reaching 38°C (and yes, I did point out that here in the UK, anything above 25 degrees for ten minutes is treated as a national emergency)
• Distribution centres running reduced crews, stores starting to close
• 4G and 5G outages knocking out card payments in stores
• The CEO, who is also the crisis lead, on leave and unreachable
• The head of warehouse operations taking immediate, unexpected leave due to a family emergency
• The COO self declaring as crisis lead, despite the plan naming only two people, both offline
• And, half an hour in, the media. First a news broadcast, then a tabloid splash, then a broadsheet journalist demanding a comment within 45 minutes

Six injects, all hitting at once. And here’s the thing I told the audience: in real life, it will be more than this. Your primary people get used to that overload because they’re in every exercise. Your delegates don’t, and they’re the ones who’ll actually be holding the bag in August.

What the audience told us

We polled throughout, and the results were genuinely revealing.

At the heat wave stage, the room split roughly 50/50 on activating the crisis team. One attendee from a broadcasting and telecommunications company said she’d expect services to run on their business continuity plans with some escalation around payment devices, not full crisis activation. Another, from an emergency services organisation, described a “preparedness coordination group”, a forward leaning stance short of full activation, where people start pricking their ears up. Both are right. What counts as a crisis depends entirely on your organisation, and if you operate across regions, what counts as an extreme event in one geography isn’t extreme in another.

Once the CEO and warehouse lead both went dark, the vast majority would invoke their plan. One brave attendee admitted their activation authority isn’t clearly documented. I’d rather have that honesty than a confident answer that falls apart on the day.

Only half had a single place where crisis team members’ leave is visible to management. That one should worry you. One health insurer we’ve worked with kept a unified leave calendar and used it to spot exactly where their gaps were, then trained alternates for those areas in advance.

The lessons I want you to take away

1. Naming a delegate is not the same as training one.This was the theme of the whole session. We run a few hundred crisis exercises a year, and the vast majority are run with primaries while the alternates watch. Flip it. Put your alternates through their paces until they’re as confident as your primary people.

And go deeper than one backup. As Paul pointed out, delegates are typically five to ten years more junior, and that delegated authority can crush them. You probably need three, four, even five people who can genuinely carry the load, not one name on a piece of paper.

2. Activation is a skill in its own right.This is something I push hard with my clients. Knowing the plan and knowing how toactivate the plan are different things. Activation means alerting the board, notifying executives who aren’t even in the plan, pressing the right buttons in the right order. These are steps your primary lead does on muscle memory and your delegates have never touched.

One approach I strongly recommend: when your primary lead activates the plan in an exercise, capture the log. How long did it take? What were the exact steps? Use AI or other tools to turn that log into a clean process, then train your delegates against it. If it took the primary ten minutes the first time, your delegate’s benchmark is visible, and next time it’s five minutes, then two. Bring them on the journey.

3. The media arrives faster than you think, and from every direction.In our scenario, the press was broadcasting within half an hour. That’s realistic. And the media won’t just send you an email with a 45 minute deadline; they’ll camp outside your headquarters and stop your staff on the street. Alert your whole organisation early that they may be approached.

You need pre approved holding statements, and you need more than one trained spokesperson. I’d say at least four to six, because different events call for different experts. One attendee shared that their entire ExCo is media trained. That’s the standard to aim for. One organisation Craig works with even keeps ties and jackets in the office so a last minute spokesperson never fronts a camera in casual clothes. They’ve thought it through.

A practical exercise tip: when you build your injects, act as the journalist. Give a participant 45 minutes to draft a full statement and make them actually send it back to you. Then turn that statement into a template and put it straight into your plan. You’ve just built a real asset during the exercise itself.

And one more thing on press injects: match the publication to the demographic. A tabloid and a broadsheet will cover the same story very differently, so make sure the articles in your exercise reflect the audiences your organisation actually faces.

4. Your third parties have the same staffing gaps you do.We get so focused on our own coverage that we forget our IT providers, logistics partners, comms agencies, and facilities teams are running skeleton crews too. And behind them sit fourth parties, the suppliers supporting your suppliers. Have you asked them what their holiday cover is? Have you checked that they’ve exercised their alternates? Your weakest link may not be inside your building.

One practice I always encourage: once your BIAs are done, build pivot reports. Map your most critical processes to every IT application and supplier behind them, and hold at least two contact details for each, stored in one central place. One contact is never enough, because the account executive you usually call is on a beach somewhere.

5. It isn’t only holidays.A reminder from Craig that stuck with the audience: most cyber events happen on a Friday night, when people are out with mates. Your alternates may need to step up at any time. Holiday periods just make the gap visible.

What the audience ranked as their biggest risks

At the start of the session we asked attendees to rank their holiday period risks. The results, highest to lowest:

1. Key person dependency: critical staff on leave with limited coverage
2. Supplier and third party failures: skeleton crews on their side, SLAs slipping
3. IT incidents with no response team available to escalate to
4. Delayed decision making when approvals sit with unavailable leaders

Notice that every one of these is a people gap, not a technology gap.

What good looks like: six takeaways

We closed with six things to check before your next peak period:

1. Plans up to date. Everyone named in them is trained, knows where they live, and offline copies exist. Your primaries know the plan well; your alternates will lean on it heavily.
2. Delegates exercised, not just named and trained. Make them go through a full exercise.
3. Staggered leave rosters with full visibility of who is on and off, and when.
4. Change freezes during peak periods. Retail does it at Christmas, insurers do it during rate changes. Fewer moving parts means less exposure.
5. Holding statements pre approved and media spokespeople named, trained, and ready.
6. Third party cover confirmed. Have your suppliers thought this through as thoroughly as you have?

Final thought

A crisis doesn’t wait for your org chart to be fully staffed. The organisations that cope are the ones whose third, fourth, and fifth choice responders have actually practised, not just read the plan. If everyone named in your plan has genuinely exercised their role, a holiday period is just another fortnight. If they haven’t, it’s a vulnerability with a date on it.

If you’d like to talk about exercising your delegates, or see how Battleground Live supports simulations like the one we ran today, get in touch with the team below.

Good luck over the holiday period, wherever you are in the world. Be prepared, and may nothing go wrong.