Why Your Emergency Plans Need to Fail: The Surprising Power of Resilience Wargaming

Tony Ridley, MSc, CSyP, FSyI, SRMCP. Originally published 8 August 2026.

Exercise programmes across critical infrastructure and systems of national significance have drifted into scripted stage productions. Injects, responses, even the branding, are pre-approved to the point that nothing resembling a genuine test survives the process. Boards and executives receive curated assurances from rooms deliberately kept blind to each other, while unresolved vulnerabilities, legacy technical debt and adaptive, malicious actors go untested against a plan that has never actually been challenged.

This is not a reputational risk. It is a governance failure, one that leaves an organisation's most senior decision-makers confidently unaware of the operational reality beneath them, right up until a live incident makes the gap public.

This piece contrasts two exercise environments familiar to anyone who has sat through a critical infrastructure tabletop: the scripted, PowerPoint-driven session where a facilitator polices participants for departing from the narrative, and a very different model borrowed from military wargaming, where resources are finite, consequences are immediate and no one in the room knows how the scenario ends. It sets out why the first produces a dangerous illusion of competence, why the second is now considered standard practice in UK national resilience circles, and what boards, executives and risk practitioners should demand before they accept an after-action report as evidence that a capability has actually been proven.

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