Episode 300: Conducttr and Robert Pratten: Risk prevention through simulations

In this episode, Dominic Bowen and Robert Pratten discuss how crisis simulation and immersive storytelling are reshaping modern approaches to risk management, crisis preparedness, and organisational resilience. Drawing on real-world experience from the design and delivery of large-scale crisis exercises, they examine why many organisations struggle to translate risk plans into effective action under pressure.

Find out more about how simulation-based training reveals behavioural, structural, and decision-making weaknesses that often remain hidden in traditional company exercises and static crisis plans. The discussion highlights how narrative design, realism, and uncertainty improve learning outcomes and prepare teams for complex, fast-moving crises.

The conversation also addresses the role of storytelling in crisis leadership, exploring how information flows, human reactions, and competing priorities shape outcomes during emergencies. Dominic and Robert consider how simulations can be used not only for response training but also for foresight and strategic planning across public and private sectors.

Finally, they explore what the future of crisis simulation looks like, from scalable digital platforms to the growing demand for cross-sector, multi-risk exercises in an era defined by geopolitical instability, technological disruption, and AI.

Robert Pratten is a UK-based transmedia storyteller, entrepreneur, and Founder and CEO of Conducttr, a crisis-simulation platform used globally for training, exercises, and information operations simulation. He is also the author of a practical guide on transmedia storytelling and a regular commentator on the intersection between narrative design, decision-making, and crisis response.

The International Risk Podcast brings you conversations with global experts, frontline practitioners, and senior decision-makers who are shaping how we understand and respond to international risk. From geopolitical volatility and organised crime to cybersecurity threats and hybrid warfare, each episode explores the forces transforming our world and what smart leaders must do to navigate them. Whether you’re a board member, policymaker, or risk professional, The International Risk Podcast delivers actionable insights, sharp analysis, and real-world stories that matter.

Dominic Bowen is the host of The International Risk Podcast and Europe’s leading expert on international risk and crisis management. As Head of Strategic Advisory and Partner at one of Europe’s leading risk management consulting firms, Dominic advises CEOs, boards, and senior executives across the continent on how to prepare for uncertainty and act with intent. He has spent decades working in war zones, advising multinational companies, and supporting Europe’s business leaders. Dominic is the go-to business advisor for leaders navigating risk, crisis, and strategy; trusted for his clarity, calmness under pressure, and ability to turn volatility into competitive advantage. Dominic equips today’s business leaders with the insight and confidence to lead through disruption and deliver sustained strategic advantage.

Transcript

00:00.04: Dominic Bowen: We spend billions of dollars on systems, on controls, on different playbooks to make sure that our companies run successfully. But when a crisis hits, it’s the story that people believe that drives behavior. It’s not the PDF that sits on SharePoint or the plan that hasn’t been read in six months. It’s the story that matters. And these stories shape how our executives interpret weak signals. It’s how our staff react under pressure, and it’s how the public judges your competence as business leaders. In today’s episode of the International Wisp Podcast, we’re diving into one of the most underused tools in the crisis management playbook, and that’s storytelling. I’m Dominic Bowen, host of the International WIS podcast. And to help me unpack this today, we’re joined by Robert Pratton. He’s the CEO of Conductor, and that’s a platform that uses immersive simulations and a narrative to prepare organizations for complex crises. Today, we’re going to explore how story-driven exercises can change decision-making. We’ll also explore why crisis simulations are ah more than just theatre and what leaders can do right now to use storytelling to make that strategic asset and make it a strategic asset as part of their crisis preparedness. Robert Pratten, welcome to the International WIS podcast.

01:25.94: Robert: Thank you very much. Yes, great to be here.

01:28.55: Dominic Bowen: Robert, where do we find you today?

01:31.38: Robert: I’m in London at the moment in Conducttr’s offices, just near the O2, which is a big concert venue here in North Greenwich.

01:42.78: Dominic Bowen: That’s not a bad place to be. Is everyone getting ready for Christmas right now?

01:46.68: Robert: Today, Dominic, is our Christmas party day. So, after lunch, I don’t know how we’re going to be supporting our clients, but after lunch, everyone’s going to be making these like terroniums. It’s like a jar with a little garden inside. So every Christmas, yeah, every Christmas, we always do some sort of creative pursuit.

02:00.95: Dominic Bowen: Wow.

02:05.34: Robert: And in the beginning, like when we first started the business, there was only a ah handful of us. And we used to do these like scavenger hunts. And then as the team grew, so there are 30 of us now, it becomes increasingly difficult to find something um to do.

02:13.52: Dominic Bowen: Yep. Yep.

02:22.26: Robert: I mean, and part of our if part of our company story is We’re not corporate, you know, like with the inverted air quotes. And so I always want people to do something creative. I don’t want to just go bowling. I don’t want to, you know, everyone getting drunk, I don’t drink myself. I used to. There’s a good reason for stopping. I don’t want, you know, like, you know, like the normal office party. I don’t want to do that normal stuff. And that’s part of our shared experience in this company to do something creative and collaborative. And it’s good fun. It’s good, yeah, it’s really good fun.

02:58.97: Dominic Bowen: It actually makes a difference. So I was working with Airbnb recently, actually in London. And in the middle of the day, we all just took a break, and they said, you know, a big part of Airbnb, it’s not just the accommodation, but it’s actually the experiences. And so what we’ve done is we’ve brought in one of our hosts from just outside of London, and she does experiences. And it was screen making, where you make T-shirts and tote bags.

03:19.90: Robert: Oh yeah, brilliant.

03:20.73: Dominic Bowen: We took an hour break and did the experience. And I tell you what, that’s the number one thing I remember from the day with Airbnb. It wasn’t everything that was said, and they’re amazing, day i an amazing company, but it was actually the experience that we all did together. It was it was such a great, a great thought that they had. So I think that’s a nice idea. Well, I hope you guys have fun tonight. Well, you’ve also, as you’ve just mentioned, I mean, you’ve built a company, you’ve built a really successful company, and it’s a big part of that is narrative and simulations. But I wonder, Robert, when you look back, when you look back over the last 20-odd years, and you were building Conductor, and you were talking about storytelling, what’s something that you didn’t know then that you wish you knew at the start about the power of storytelling?

04:53.87: Robert: I think I often reflect on that sort of cliche or that maxim that every business is a people business because, you know, we do software, and you think, well, it’s a software business, but every business is a people business. And what does that mean? Well, that means every business is a storytelling business because stories are the way that people make sense of the world. And if you’re trying to get people to sign up to your idea, if you’re trying to get everyone to focus in the same direction, you need a good story because the narrative shapes… the people’s perception of the threats and the opportunities. And you want everybody to get behind that. And that’s why it’s important in any business to be able to deliver your message in a really engaging way. And is when I say deliver a message, I don’t just mean… You know, I’m there on a sort of unicycle juggling. Oh, look at me over here. What I mean is that you need to say something that resonates with the people that you’re hiring um so that they all feel like that common mission and everything. And yeah this this week, actually, because it’s coming up to Christmas, is our um is basically like appraisal week. So always say to people, like you don’t have to wait for that one time a year, you know, to express any sort of anxieties or hopes or whatever. You can come at any time. But once a year, we do this thing. And one of the things I find really important, heartening, and rewarding is when you listen to the team, and they’re so engaged with our mission. Honestly, it’s so rewarding. It’s one of the best things about running a business.

06:48.34: Dominic Bowen: I think that engagement is such an important point. I think all leadership teams are good at communicating outwards, or maybe not even communicating, that’s the wrong word, but they’re good at speaking out or sending messages outward, but actually, how much engagement there is. And I think some organizations are a little bit better at the employees speaking back to management. But again, how often is that actually heard? And you know I sit in a lot of executive team meetings, a lot of board meetings, and I watch that tennis match go back and forth. And often I can see, you can just see it on the faces. You can see it when people’s pens are moving, when they’re listening, when they’re playing with their phone. They’re not actually listening.

07:26.69: Dominic Bowen: They’re thinking about the next thing to say, or they’ve already got their wall up, and they’re like, No, whatever this employee says, I don’t like the tone. I don’t like how it’s being delivered. I made my point. That’s all that has to be said. I think that’s a real risk. How does storytelling play into that? Because, you know, we’ve had some, we’ve actually had some really great guests over the years talk about the power of communication when it comes to risk management, crisis preparedness, certainly crisis resolution. But talk to us about what engagement really means.

07:55.74: Robert: So yeah, there are different ways to look at engagement, I think. So, on a like, let’s say, academic level, we always say to our clients, there are three ways to engage. It’s through challenge, it’s through narrative, and it’s through spectacle. So when you build an exercise, you might have a really glossy breaking news video, and you’ll capture attention for a bit. And that’s kind of like the spectacle. If you get a phone call coming in, like any kind of rich media, and then you’ve got the narrative. So that has to resonate. If you think of adult learning principles and teaching, and what is a crisis exercise if it’s not an opportunity for people to learn, then it needs to be it needs to be relevant. It needs to be sort of oriented towards their goals. And then the other one is the challenge-based. And I think that’s i think that’s the absolute key because… People are engaged in solving a problem, in making decisions. And this is one of the limitations of a PowerPoint-based exercise. Because if you’re the expert and you’re there and you’re, you know, there are times when that might be the right thing to do, to have a discussion-based exercise. So people feel like they can talk through some of the things they’re unsure of. But if you want people to be able to step up in a time of crisis, they need confidence. They needed to have done that. And that challenge aspect is really key.

09:33.99: Dominic Bowen: Yeah, I really like that. And I like you the the point about how narratives shape perceptions. And I think that’s really important. And you and I have spoken before about you know how the CEO, in my opinion, the first and most important responsibility of every CEO is to be the chief storyteller. They are the storyteller for the company and within the company. And they’re setting the tone. And I think nearly every company that I meet with says that they’re prepared for a crisis. They’re prepared for a crisis. But when you, of course, look under the hood, there are different levels. There are very different levels of preparedness. And I think how business leaders and executives and managers narrate and talk about their level of preparedness, how they talk about the risks that their companies face and and what they’re doing about it, and their awareness and their monitoring of it, can really change how well prepared a ah company is and what their actual risk exposure is. Have you come across any examples, perhaps, where organizations are actually undermining their own preparedness because of the incorrect story that they’re telling themselves?

10:40.76: Robert: Not that specifically, but I do feel like what we’re aiming for in companies is a behavioral effect.

10:53.84: Dominic Bowen: Yep.

10:54.14: Robert: So a lot of my work is in information operations and simulating information operations for like governments and or defending against stuff like that. And so it’s predominantly focused on how to get behavior change. And when we first started the company, because we’re kind of like industry outsiders in that we came from an entertainment background into this. And Belen and I were creating these participatory experiences. And you want people to engage and do things for you. So we had to look at why people behave the way they do. And the narrative aspect is the way they’re wired. And one of the problems you see in organizations is that they think awareness and punishment are the two things that they need to do. So when you look at like ISO 27001, it goes, oh, what are the punishments for people that don’t abide by the policy? Oh, want to see that people get sacked. Where’s that way too late? Right? The biggest vulnerability in the company is the people. And so you get all these, like all these technology companies, saying we’ve got AI and all that. And probably companies are listening to the podcast that has invested millions in cybersecurity, and then they won’t splash out a few bob on a crisis exercise. And yet that’s your biggest that’s your Achilles heel right now, because someone is going to get catfished. They’re going to give away the keys, and then there are millions of pounds squandered because you didn’t do the exercise. And so, yeah, I mean, I think where that comes from is another type of storytelling. It’s the, let me step back a bit. We are uncomfortable as humans with random pieces of information. The way that we selectively ah take data, not data, the way we selectively take data is based on our belief system. And that belief system is built on a narrative. And that narrative has grown through our experiences. So we’re already filtering a lot of stuff. And we’re only tuned into things that we think are important, that will further our goals, that will reinforce our self-beliefs. And then… In an exercise, people are saying, or, you know, in an organization, the story they tell their self is, oh, if there’s a bigger punishment, if there’s more awareness. But look at the awareness we have of smoking. It’s not really done very much. And then you’ve got another generation of youngsters all vaping on the narrative, on the belief that these are less harmful than cigarettes. Well, whether they are or not, it doesn’t really matter because it’s still not good for you. can’t be, can It’d be sucking in all those toxins. So awareness on its own and punishment are not the things that are going to change behavior and improve your security posture. And unfortunately, that is a narrative we need to change in businesses to say to them, You need to do participatory crisis exercises where people actually get hands-on with a problem and, you know, they they engage with the issue and try to solve it during that during that exercise because then what you’re doing is they are through that experience and the mind can’t tell the difference between a real crisis and a crisis exercise if it’s done if it’s realistic enough. And what happens is they, yeah, they take away that feeling. They actually take away a changed belief system that, right, I get it now. I understand why we need to do that. I understand why we need it because there’s not enough time. And you could say to people, Oh, the reason we have defensive lines to take in a crisis is so you don’t have to, you know, think off the top of your head about how we’re going to respond. But you want them also to have the confidence to say, well, I’m going to sound like a lawyer, and this is an opportunity where I really need to connect, you know, with my audience. But without that, you won’t have that confidence if you’ve only had fact-based learning. You need to be in the exercise. You need to go through it. And you need to see the consequences of doing the right or the wrong thing. And then you’re really going to feel like prepared. There’s a reason why. Pilots go through simulations. If they could sit there and read the you know the manual, and go, oh, could be an amazing pilot. I’ve read this massive document about if ah you know if the plane starts to dip or if I get turbulence, I need to do this. I wouldn’t trust a pilot who’s only suddenly read the manual. I want to know he’s been in hours of simulation. So, and this is why we pay for experience, isn’t it? This is why we pay for senior leaders who have been through lots of real-life crises. And a good simulation is a way to accelerate that expertise for younger people who haven’t been in the organization. And even… Even experienced crisis people who may have, if they’re lucky, they’ve only been through a few in their lives. And it’s an opportunity to bring that expertise into other types of crises that they may not have experienced before.

16:29.89: Dominic Bowen: Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that amazing, Robert, that pilots, amazingly well-educated, generally very, very intelligent individuals, have to undergo training and they use checklists. Doctors, generally incredibly intelligent, incredibly well-trained, have to undergo professional development training every single year.

16:41.18: Robert: Yeah, exactly, yeah.

16:47.15: Dominic Bowen: They use checklists. They go through training. Same for most professional entity professional professions. And yet we think when we go into a crisis, we don’t need to rehearse for it. We don’t need to have this process, and we’re going to be okay with it. I mean, the mind just boggles. The mind just boggles.

17:05.85: Robert: Well, the problem is in a stress in a stressful situation, all your faculties shut down. So you actually stop listening. And if you’re in a crisis team and someone’s saying to you, Oh, I’ve done this, I’ve done that, they think that you might have heard. You might not have heard at all because listening is also a cognitive function. So, you know, it’s better if they come up, touch you on the shoulder, and have I your attention? Right, I need to tell you this. And the thing with the checklists is that while you’re stressed and you’re not thinking straight, you’ve got something to sort of anchor you again to remind you of doing these things, it’s very easy to forget stuff.

17:46.84: Dominic Bowen:  You’re totally right. i mean, yesterday, we were talking before, yesterday, I ran a crisis management exercise for a large company across three countries. And during the debrief, I was talking about ah not the manager or the crisis management chair, but actually people offering leadership. And I was saying anyone can offer leadership. And a classic example was in one part of the exercise, someone was offering leadership, but it wasn’t necessarily the most healthy form of leadership. And it was perhaps not the most productive for the team. And you could see other people nodding during the debrief. Everyone recognized that this person was just too focused on their task. And it was ah an important task, but it wasn’t the most important task. And so I said, you know, could anyone else have offered leadership in that opportunity? And of course, as you said, sometimes it involves not just looking at the task and the team, but the task, team, and individual. And sometimes that does, I think, and I often encourage this for whoever’s offering leadership to actually stand up and walk over to the person they’re engaging with. And it might be a tap on the shoulder. It might just be sitting down beside them, just going, hey, Robert. Did you get that point? Or what do you think about? Or, hey, I heard what you said before about X. Is this the right time to release that media statement? And there are a lot of different ways we can move the task forward, keep the team synchronized, but also look after that individual and make sure we’re doing that. But we’ve got to employ quite a few different skills, I think, to get to that end.

19:12.54: Robert: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that brings to mind another thing about real-life crises, and that’s like the decision-making style. So some people are like optimizers, and some are satisficers. And in daily life, an optimizer would be somebody who, you know, gets all the information before making a decision, and they’re not the best person in a crisis because in a crisis, there’s a lot of ambiguity. The more you wait for the optimum amount of information, the longer it is before you’ve actually done anything. And so satisfices are much better. That is unlikely to be uncovered in a PowerPoint presentation ah where people are leaning back on their chairs with their arms behind it. Oh, well, of course, if I were in a crisis, I’d be totally in control. I’d be doing this, you know. So if you actually run a crisis, we will actually see what type of decision maker you are.

20:12.38: Dominic Bowen: I love the sentence, we don’t rise to the level of a crisis, we fall to our base of training. And I think that’s really, really true. And Robert, I’ll take this opportunity to remind our listeners that if you prefer to watch your podcasts, you can find the International WISP podcast on YouTube. So please remember to go to YouTube and search for the International WISP podcast, and you can watch, subscribe, and like our content there. So please have a look at YouTube as well. But Robert, you mentioned before about information and the information and environment. We really are living in a world where information warfare, hybrid warfare, deep fakes, and disinformation are just everywhere, and they impact all of us. I’d love to hear about your experience over the last couple of decades, how you’ve seen the global information environment change and change the way that organizations should think about how they manage crisis and how they manage storytelling during a crisis compared to, say, 10, 20 years ago?

21:14.33: Robert: Well, of course, I think the big change is that, you know, in the past, there were key media outlets. And, that you know, if you were responsible for a reputational crisis, you would… You know, have a relationship with the news organizations, make sure your message gets out. Let’s control the message. That’s, you know, I don’t, I don’t know that that’s true. Even if it were true then, it’s definitely not true today because so many more people are empowered to generate their own media. They have infinite distribution on the internet and so on. I think it’s much more important to be authentic, to do what you say you’re doing rather than say one thing and do another because you’re going to get found out. And then even if you do and say the right thing, there’s still going to be people trying to twist that and use it for their own ends. And I was thinking about when you were asking that question, I was thinking about how if you look at some activists, they can co-opt brands to serve their ends because it gives them the visibility. So if you look at the, there was um during the American elections in Atlanta, there was a group that was trying to prevent water from being distributed um on the polling queue. So when people were sort of queuing up to cast their vote, you can imagine it’s like roasting hot in Atlanta. People are dehydrating. And it was a little bit of sort of gerrymandering, wasn’t it? So if you’re not allowed to offer people water while they’re queuing up to vote, then maybe they’ll not cast their vote, right? So then these activists reach out to Coke and go, Hey, this is Atlanta. This is your city. Are you comfortable with that? And so something which has got nothing to do with Coke, all of a sudden finds themselves having to have an opinion um whether this is important or not. So it’s I think it’s really, really you know really interesting. And that’s a situation where… narrative is important. So different people are going to give different reasons for why they should or shouldn’t do this, that, and the other. And you’ve got to have a very compelling story for why you’re behaving the way you are. You need to be able to set out your stool and explain in ways that resonate with people. It’s not enough just to go with the facts. Nobody cares about facts, as I mentioned before. There’s a lot of information out there. And not yet. Everyone just filters what they want through their own, let’s say, bias, but through their own lens. And you need a story that resonates with that lens of the people you’re trying to connect with.

25:40.86: Dominic Bowen: Well, I mean, leaders often get it wrong with the storytelling, whether they’re telling the story internally, whether they’re telling it to their staff or or telling it to the outside world. But conductors are a technology platform and and and you’re helping organizations prepare and and plan for crisis by going through some realistic scenarios. When you’re designing this with your clients, what are some of the non-negotiable principles that you really insist on when you’re designing these scenarios and and you’re helping them craft their responses?

26:13.14: Robert: I think the most important thing when people are preparing for a crisis exercise is just to have a single or a well-focused training objective. Because if you try to cover too many things, it’s like when you’re writing a story, what’s the premise? What is it that you’re trying to get across to this audience? And that should be your guiding light, really. And I think the biggest mistake I see sometimes is… people throwing too much into an exercise, so that the learning is not going to be clear about what it is you’re trying to show. And the other thing as well is trying to get people to read too much. So if it’s possible, so if it’s important, to understand the policy, that’s best done before the exercise. Like there are other ways to do that, like a self-paced exercise and all this sort of stuff, which, I mean, we have solutions for that as well, but our core sort of business is the team-based exercise, and that should be participatory. So you want that to be much closer to a rehearsal and much less about reading stuff. And I think clients who have, and most, let’s face it, most people, come from the position where they’ve sort of grown up with PowerPoint-type crisis exercises. So they’re much better at delivering ah you know, delivering a story rather than having um an emergent story. Because what you want is to provide um information in the environment in such a way that people draw their own conclusions from that, and you set up challenges for them. So, let’s look at a story, right? So you have a character in a story, and they go through different challenges, and by overcoming those challenges, they reveal their tu true character. So in a good novel and a good movie, someone starts at one position. And by the end of the book, they’ve actually grown as an individual, and they’ve learned lessons in life and so on. And that’s how it should be in a crisis exercise. And that person is the player. So the player goes through this journey from the start of the exercise, they encounter like rising challenges, and then there may or may not be a resolution because part of the resolution might be the after-action review, where everyone discusses what they enjoyed and what they didn’t do. And it’s that’s how to think about the exercise, not about I need them to know this, I need them to know that. It’s not about knowing stuff or in terms of the procedures, necessarily, but it’s about being able to make the right decision.

28:59.22: Dominic Bowen: Yeah, I think that’s i think that’s great. Now, Robert, I’m one of those really annoying people that the, you know, I’m always asking the boss and my clients, like, what went well? What can we do better? If we do if we repeated this, what would you want to see improved? And yeah, know those sorts of questions. And I remember years ago, I was running some training with some good friends and colleagues, and this was back in. Everything was done on paper back in those days. And the students all submitted paper evaluations of the course. And I was reading them as soon as the course finished. And one of my mates comes up. He’s like, you love reading those, don’t you? And oh, I love it. I love it. It’s really, it gets me excited. What we can improve for the next course, what we can do better, what we can learn. And he just stops me, and he goes, Dom, when was the last time anyone came up to you and said you were a shit facilitator? And I went, never. Never. And he looked at me, and I went, “Oh, bugger!” He’s like, “yeah, that’s right. No one’s ever going to say that, mate. You know, everyone’s always going to say, ‘oh, it was really useful. Oh, we really enjoyed it. Oh, it was a lot of fun’. And I was like, “oh, I hate the fact that you are so, so correct””. And I think, you know, boards and executive teams, really want to know. They invest a lot and and good companies are investing a lot in risk management, in crisis preparedness. But they do want to know that it’s more than just useful, that they’re actually getting some value for it. How do we know, you know, and how do you help clients track whether doing all this work on crisis preparedness is worth the time and the effort? How do we measure success?

30:27.56: Robert: I think the measure of success is the qualitative um side of the response. I just… to sort of switch that question a little bit is I think that too many companies want to quantify stuff. So they think that either they only care about compliance. So it’s like, I’ll just knock this exercise out. Give me some numbers that show we’ve improved. Yeah. When actually there’s no evidence that anyone’s improved. What you’ve got is some stats that make it look like people are doing the right thing. So there’s that side of it. And there’s another side where… The real growth comes in individuals, and that growth comes from observing what they’re doing. As you mentioned before, good teamwork in a crisis is about collaboration and communication. And what you should be looking for is behaviors. So you might be able to quantify those. You might say, okay, the behavior I want is that this person didn’t get stressed, that under pressure, they were able to communicate instructions very clearly, and you might score that. But I don’t think it’s about, but at least recognize that there’s an expert observer who’s watching or, you know, tuning into that person’s behavior and saying, yeah, we want to encourage that behavior. We don’t want to; that behavior we don’t want to encourage. And so even if at the end you come out with, you know, like a scorecard, it’s not been done by a machine. There’s still a role for humans to be able to look at that. I mean, there are some things that you can automate. So we use a lot of artificial intelligence, but everything is… should be approved by an expert. So, for example, if you what you can do on our platform, if I’m just diving a little bit. So let’s say somebody puts out a statement. You can ask the AI, assess this statement, either for readability or persuasiveness, or whatever your criteria are, and it will give you a score, and it will give an explanation. But it’s not just filed away and put in the report. What it’s trying to do is save you time. You know, you referred to the checklist before. So if I’m the observer, I’m trying to save you time. So the prompt is basically like got that checklist in, if things to look for in a persuasive argument or whatever. So it will go through, and it will write that assessment very quickly, but then you should read it through. And if you disagree with it, you’re already the expert. So, you know, just feel free to disagree with it. So there are things like that. But I think there’s so much that’s also not necessarily going to be recorded, like those conversations that people have across the desk. Like whether they leave the room and don’t come in, whether they’re like, they’re just their general humming and huffing and creating a bad atmosphere in the room. That’s not going to be captured digitally, but someone needs to feed that back. So, do see what I mean? So I think in order to, and there was a survey actually, and it’s um by one of the like big four. And I think they said that something like 70% of boards have no confidence in their crisis team that they’ll step up in their hour of need. So what does that tell you? It says that, but I bet those people can go, oh yeah, we do a crisis exercise every year. Now, what you do is every year you have a load of people, sitting around just discussing what you might do in a crisis rather than actually going through it, and have someone just. I think a lot of people are a little bit afraid of embarrassing the boss or something like that. But I think if you’re a leader, you just need to be a little bit more open to the fact that, you know, if you don’t step outside your comfort zone, you’re not going to grow. And isn’t it better to experience that discomfort? And if there is any, I mean, I think it’s possible to avoid the embarrassment, but let’s say your greatest fear is being embarrassed. Isn’t it better to have the embarrassment in a simulation rather than wait till like there’s oil all up the beach? Think how embarrassed you’re going to be then. Yeah. when it’s all falling apart. Dude, you can spend all that embarrassment time in retirement because you ain’t going to be running a company again. So let’s, you know, you know I don’t know, just just be a little bit more sort of resilient to feedback. And I think that also comes down to the company culture. And that company culture is, again, down to a narrative about what people think is good behavior, bad behavior, what’s acceptable, what’s not.

35:22.61: Dominic Bowen: Unquestionably, Robert, and I think all of us want to be professional. And I think most people would describe themselves as a professional. But if I think about some of the most genuinely professional cultures and organisations I’ve worked with over the years, they really are organisations where the senior person can say to someone quite junior in the team, “Hey, can you walk me through this?” “Hey, can you give me feedback?” And conversely, even if that feedback is not asked for, someone who might be on an organizational chart, much more junior can say, Hey, boss, you need to do this. Hey, boss, we need to fix that. Hey, let’s let’s let’s revise this. Let’s do this better. And it can feel a little bit uncomfortable, but oh, gosh, it feels so good once you improve it. And surely it’s better to get that right on the range, in the boardroom, in the meeting location, instead of being out in the field or you know in front of a client or during a crisis. And then go, “oh, gosh. I really wish we’d fix that better. But exactly”.

36:16.17: Robert: I mean, I agree. If you don’t have that open culture, what will happen is that somebody on the team is going to spot something wrong and won’t come forward with it. And that’s a problem. And then later on, that leader is going to be going, you saw that, why don’t you come forward? And now they’re shouting at him. You had that information. Why don’t you… Well, because you’re a bully, mate. That is why. Because I didn’t want I didn’t want to have the hair dryer treatment. It’s not my fault. I’m just the messenger. Don’t shoot me!

36:47.67: Dominic Bowen: Robert, well, look, thank you very much for coming on the International Risk Podcast today. I’ve enjoyed the conversation, and I think we’ll definitely have to have you back on and explore a few more topics again.

36:58.30: Robert: Thank you very much, Dominic. It’s great to be here.

37:00.95: Dominic Bowen: Well, that was a great conversation with Robert Pratten. He’s the CEO of Conductor, and they’re a platform that uses immersive simulations and narratives to prepare organizations for complex crises. Today’s podcast was produced and coordinated by Melanie Meimoun, and our multimedia and video content was produced by Stephen Penney. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening. We’ll speak again in the next couple of days.