Ten minutes to a safer school: Tabletops 101

One service Fine Point Communications provides is assisting clients with their crisis planning, including by facilitating tabletop exercises.

In our experience, every school would benefit greatly from such exercises. They provide teams with a low-stress way to preview the circumstances in an emergency scenario.

The process is useful — maybe even invaluable — in identifying gaps in a crisis plan, including blind spots and needed personnel. And the takeaways always leave a school better prepared for whatever might be around the corner.

Yet, we find that school leaders do not routinely schedule tabletops throughout the year. One reason we hear: The exercise feels too hard to arrange.

So this month, we will go through the basics of a tabletop exercise. As you’ll see, the process is not difficult, and it can even be done impromptu as a “pop quiz,” like a real crisis would be.

Every tabletop needs a few essential elements:

A scenario
A time limit
A facilitator to direct the exercise
An after-exercise report

We recommend assigning a scribe for these sessions, rather than having the facilitator take notes. This frees the facilitator to guide the conversation and perhaps to introduce a surprise or two along the way. (More on this in a bit.)

Scenario

An appropriate tabletop scenario is any urgent situation that emerges without warning. It could be an event your school has already experienced and where you would like to improve the response. It could be something that you’ve read about happening elsewhere. Or it could be a worry that has you wondering how the school would respond.

For your first few tabletops, keep the scenario straightforward, such as a tornado warning or a power outage. And keep it simple: Summarize the situation in only one brief sentence.

Instinct may draw you toward the topics of greatest need or concern — an active-shooter situation, for instance. But think of those as senior-level exercises; you’re starting at the first-year level. Some group familiarity with the process is necessary before taking on deeply complex and emotionally challenging issues.

Here are a few more example scenarios:

A server crashes, taking down online access and potentially losing data
An extraordinary number of teachers call in sick on one day
A school bus carrying students has an accident; no one is injured

Time limit

We recommend that tabletops run 10 to 15 minutes. The group needs some time to absorb the scenario, propose responses and come to decisions, but not so much time that you lose your focus and sense of urgency.

Facilitator

This could be the senior official in the meeting or an outside person brought in for the task. Yet another approach is to rotate the role. This provides more people with the opportunity to lead the exercise, and new points of view can emerge.

The facilitator should keep an eye on time but also listen actively to the conversation, drawing attention to areas that the group might be overlooking.

After the group has completed a few tabletops, facilitators might consider throwing a curveball into their scenario, such as making certain personnel unavailable (think: out of town with donors), or even during the discussion — like announcing that phone lines have gone down or certain doors or hallways are suddenly inaccessible.

Takeaways/after-exercise work

Before concluding the exercise, the facilitator should ask the group to name awareness and/or lessons it drew, including any specific areas for immediate or longer-term follow-up.

The scribe will capture these, after which the facilitator should use the notes to prepare the first draft of an after-exercise report. Other group members should weigh in on the report, the final version of which would ideally inform new policies or checklists that address the takeaways.

As you can see, it’s a relatively simple process.

If you’d like to talk further about tabletops or get assistance in bringing the process to your school, drop us a line.

Lessons for schools from OpenAI’s soap opera

At Fine Point HQ, we have eaten a lot of popcorn while reading about OpenAI’s firing and rehiring of its CEO.

Control of the company may be resolved, but the battles between capitalism and idealism, between Wall Street and the academy and between artificial intelligence “accelerationists” and “doomers” are not. The aftershocks will be noticeable for a long time.

For our purposes, a couple of points from the OpenAI fight seem relevant:

The board was unready for a PR battle

From all indications, OpenAI’s board paid little attention to the external forces that firing the CEO would unleash. It was equally unprepared to address internal concerns. Rather, it simply named an interim CEO and refused to entertain further discussion.

Sam Altman, the ousted CEO, understood better: Everyone’s reputation was suddenly at risk, and investors, reporters and OpenAI employees alike would be ravenous for details after such a surprise. This was a textbook public relations situation.

Give Altman credit for knowing how to play the PR game. The spin from him and his financial and philosophical allies both dominated the media narrative and discredited the board.

Even now, we don’t know much about what drove OpenAI’s board to act, but let’s just say that the approach of “Ready, fire, aim” is not likely to sustain a board’s authority.

Firing Altman was certainly within the board’s purview, but it skipped a critical step by failing to prepare and advance a compelling public story for why it did so. That was a major bungle.

Labor gets a vote, too

In two terrific columns last week, Matt Levine of Bloomberg noted how trustees and employees of nonprofit organizations can end up in serious conflict:

“The staff answers to the board, and the board answers to … no one? Their own consciences? There are no shareholders; the board’s main duties are to the [nonprofit’s] mission. … The board’s abstract commitment to the mission [can conflict] with the practical, on-the-ground experiences of the staff.”

“If the staff all quit,” Levine added, “then the nonprofit is in trouble; if the directors all quit, they’re pretty replaceable.”

Levine published that column last Tuesday afternoon; hours later, OpenAI’s board was overhauled — answering a demand by hundreds of its employees, who threatened to quit and jump to Microsoft.

The division Levine describes can show up in independent schools, too, when faculty and staff’s “on-the-ground experiences” conflict with the views or desires of trustees. If an us-vs.-them dynamic takes hold and tensions grow hot enough to boil over, the whole institution can suffer.

One way to improve alignment is for boards to dedicate a few ex officio seats to employee representatives. That way, faculty and staff views factor into board conversations, giving the rank and file some involvement with executive decision-making and watering down the us-vs.-them sentiment.

(Then again, OpenAI had employee representation on its board. Those members divided on Altman, however, which exacerbated their crisis. Pass the popcorn!)

Join us in Austin!

Longtime Refill readers know how much we at Fine Point look forward each year to attending the annual CASE-NAIS Independent Schools Conference.

This one, though, will be extra special: It’s time to give back to a conference that has meant a lot to this company. So, for the first time, Fine Point Communications is a Bronze Sponsor for the 2024 conference, in Austin from Jan. 21 to 23.

To celebrate the milestone, we want to extend a special offer to you, dear reader: Join us for a dinner that is just for Refill subscribers.

We will gather on Sunday night, Jan. 21, taking up a private room where we can get acquainted, talk shop (or not!) and just enjoy each other’s company. Leave your wallet in your room; Fine Point is picking up the tab.

Space is limited, so if you are interested and planning to come to CASE-NAIS, drop me a line ASAP to reserve your spot. When the seats are gone, they’re gone.

If you already have plans for that evening, please make a point of stopping by to say hello in the Marketplace during the conference. We’re excited by this opportunity to chat with attendees, and we would be thrilled to say thank you in person for being a Refill reader.