Monday, September 13, 2010

Taking Crisis Communication training to a new level with iPad

For some time Creative Territory has been offering workshops about communicating in a crisis. With our extensive experience in handling crises in the Northern Territory in particular, we’ve developed a good understanding of how communication can make or break your reputation when things go wrong.

But in delivering our training, something has always been missing – the consequences. Most crisis training includes some type of scenario exercise, but they are virtually all linear. The scenario plays out the same regardless of what people decide in the workshop itself. While they promote discussion, there are no consequences for choosing the right or the wrong path.

For six months we’ve been working on a way to get some real interactivity into the mix, so people could make choices along the way and see the consequences of those choices.

Thanks to the iPad, and a lot of work scenario planning, we’ve developed a way. And the feedback has been amazing. See Recovery in action with a free demo at this link.

Here are some comments from our first workshop, held in Alice Springs last week:

“We’ve only been going for two minutes and I’m already more engaged in this than I have ever been in a workshop before.”
“The iPad delivery is cool. We were all sitting there waiting for our turn to play.”
“At first I wanted a whiteboard to write everything down on, but then I realised we didn’t need one.”
“It’s great that there are consequences for what you decide. It makes it more real.”
We’ve called our new workshops Recovery, because we teach our clients that this is where your decisions need to be leading whenever you are faced with a real or potential crisis. The decisions you make and the things you say in the heat of the moment can have a lasting impact on your reputation and bottom line.

Recovery is presently undergoing trials in the Northern Territory and Queensland, with plans to launch it in Darwin in October.