By Conducttr

In this episode of the International Risk Podcast, we’re joined by Robert Pratten, storyteller, risk manager, and CEO of Conducttr, a platform providing high-standard risk simulation scenarios.

“Stories are how we make sense of the world”.

Organisational preparedness depends on how people interpret events, not just on whether procedures exist. In moments of uncertainty, individuals and teams do not experience a situation as a neutral set of facts. They first decide what kind of situation they are facing, why it matters, and what sort of response makes sense. That judgement is shaped as a story – it’s narrative. Humans use stories to make sense of the world, and this interpretation happens before plans are consulted or processes are triggered.

Karl Weick, a leading scholar of organisational behaviour, describes crisis response as a process of sensemaking, where people act based on the meaning they construct from events as they happen, not on complete or objective information. In his work, interpretation is not a later step in response; it is what makes action possible in the first place.

Checklists, protocols, and clear guidance are valuable, and particularly when confusion is high and cognitive load is heavy as it is in a crisis. But procedures cannot be applied effectively if the situation has been misread. Interpretation comes first. It determines which procedures are relevant and whether they will be used at all.

The crisis narrative – the interpretation of unfolding events – is created from prior experience and memory. When people encounter something unfamiliar, they reach for the closest story they already have to guide interpretation and action. If that story fits the situation, decisions tend to be quicker and more consistent. If it does not, hesitation and divergence follow.

Where direct experience is limited, the stories organisations rely on may be assumed rather than tested. They may be internally coherent, but they have not been examined under pressure, ambiguity, or competing demands. This creates a gap between what an organisation expects to happen and how its people will actually behave when the situation becomes real.

Realistic exercises are how that gap is addressed. Exercises create experience in an accelerated way, allowing narratives about disruption, decision-making, and response to be formed and examined in advance. Preparedness therefore depends not only on documentation, but on rehearsal.

How narrative governs action

Before escalation, coordination, or decision-making can occur, a situation must be interpreted. In conditions of uncertainty, as they are in a crisis, teams organise incomplete information into a working understanding that answers a small number of practical questions:

• What is happening right now?
• How serious is it likely to be?
• What does this mean for us?
• What kind of response makes sense?

This process is fast and largely implicit. It allows people to act without waiting for complete information and helps reduce cognitive overload.

In organisational settings, shared interpretation plays a significant coordinating role. When teams hold the same view of what is happening, their actions tend to align, even across different functions. When interpretations differ, responses fragment: one part of the organisation may treat an event as routine while another sees it as escalating, leading to inconsistent priorities and timing.

Preparedness improves when organisations recognise that interpretation precedes process (or making interpretation the first part of the process), and recognising that aligning narrative early supports more coherent action later.

Experience, memory, and the default story

The narratives used in a crisis are usually retrieved rather than constructed. Under pressure, people rely on mental models shaped by what they have previously seen, done, or discussed. These models are effectively stories. They reflect remembered situations and the meaning attached to them, not a detailed recall of events.

British psychologist Frederic Bartlet was one of the earliest researchers to study how memory actually works, and showed that people do not store past events as accurate records. Instead, they reconstruct them using familiar structures or schemas. What is retained is the sense of what happened and what it meant, rather than a precise sequence of facts. This is narrative – it’s storytelling.

Three features of memory are particularly relevant to organisational preparedness:

• Memory stores meaning rather than detail. People remember what a situation represented and how it unfolded, not a precise sequence of facts.
• Past experience shapes judgement. In fast-moving situations, individuals default to the closest familiar story available to them.
• Expectation guides attention. Information that fits an emerging narrative is more readily noticed than information that challenges it.

Another psychologist, Gary Klein, studied how firefighters, pilots, and military commanders make decisions under pressure. He developed the model described as recognition-primed decision-making which states that experienced practitioners do not typically compare options analytically. Instead, they recognise familiar patterns based on prior experience and act on the first option that makes sense. Their judgement is driven by stored mental stories of what has worked before.

Together, the work of Bartlett and Klein point to the same conclusion: under pressure, people do not reason from first principles. They interpret situations through remembered stories. If those stories are based on limited or hypothetical experience, then their confidence may be misplaced and judgement constrained.

Preparedness matures when organisations accept that experience shapes judgement, and that experience can be developed deliberately and at accelerated rates through exercising.

Exercises as a way of creating and testing narrative

Exercises provide the mechanism for improving interpretation, improving judgement and hence accelerating experience.

A well-designed exercise gives participants a structured encounter with uncertainty. It allows them to experience:

• Incomplete and evolving information
• Time pressure and prioritisation
• Coordination across roles and functions
• The effects of decisions and delays

From this experience, people form memories. From those memories, they develop narratives about how disruption unfolds and how the organisation responds. These narratives become the reference points people draw on in later situations.

This is a key value in exercising – it’s not just familiarising teams with procedures – it’s creating lived experiences that people will rely on when interpretation and judgement matter most.

Exercises also surface differences between expectation and reality. Assumptions that remain implicit in plans become visible when people are required to act. Variations in interpretation across teams emerge quickly. And of course, gaps in procedures become apparent where guidance is missing, unclear, or designed for different circumstances. These moments are useful because they allow both narratives and practical guidance to be examined and adjusted before a real event demands action.

When exercises fail to prepare

Poorly designed exercises can create misleading narratives or false confidence. This happens when scenarios are “too chatty”, too abstract, too scripted, or the team is guaranteed to succeed. If participants know exactly what will happen next, they are not interpreting uncertainty and they are following a predetermined sequence. If the scenario also feels implausible, participants disengage and the experience generates no durable memory or experience.

The risk is that exercises become theatre – a PowerPoint performance that reassures attendees without testing capability. Plans are declared validated, boxes are ticked, but the organisation remains unprepared. No wonder then that multiple surveys have found 70% companies have no faith that their crisis teams will step-up in the hour of need.

Realistic exercises avoid this by creating genuine pressure and allowing friction to create opportunities for improvement. They force participants to interpret evolving situations without certainty about outcomes. Some discomfort is the point. It produces narratives grounded in what actually happens under pressure, not what people wish would happen.

Why realism matters

For exercises to be useful, scenarios must be plausible enough that participants recognise them as relevant to their own roles and decisions.

When a scenario is overly abstract or simplified, participants treat it as hypothetical. The experience is mentally filed as “exercise-only” rather than something that informs real judgement. Any lessons identified remain disconnected from day-to-day practice and are easily dismissed once the exercise ends.

Realistic exercises work differently. They create conditions close enough to reality that participants reason as they would in their actual roles. Decisions are made with real constraints in mind, and outcomes are interpreted as indications of how the organisation would perform in practice. The narratives formed are easier to recall and, importantly, easier to apply.

This aligns with research on experiential learning, which shows that learning transfers more effectively when it occurs in contexts that resemble real work. When the context feels authentic, people reason, decide, and remember differently.

Repeated, realistic exercises reinforce this transfer of learning. Over time, teams develop a shared understanding of how situations are likely to unfold and which responses tend to work. This improves consistency of interpretation, reduces surprise, and supports more coordinated action when real events occur.

Conclusion

Storytelling in organisational preparedness is not only about communication or persuasion. It is about how people make sense of uncertainty, interpret events, and decide what action makes sense. It’s narrative that connects experience, memory, judgement, and behaviour.

These narratives exist whether they are acknowledged or not. They are shaped by experience and organisational culture, and they guide behaviour under pressure. When left unexamined, they are often assumed rather than tested.

Preparedness improves when organisations treat storytelling as a practical discipline. Exercises matter in this context because they shape experience and memory, and therefore the stories people will rely on when interpretation and judgement matter most – in a crisis. Organisations tend to succeed or fail not because procedures were missing, but because of how situations were (mis)understood in the moment.