An overview of Crisis Simulations: what it is, how it works, key terminology, and how to navigate the platform.
Overview
Crisis Simulations is a browser-based crisis exercising tool that puts teams inside realistic, scenario-driven incidents — from ransomware attacks to supply chain compromises — and asks them to make decisions under pressure.
Exercises can run asynchronously so participants complete them at their own pace, or as facilitated live sessions with a presenter and a voting audience. Both technical and non-technical teams can take part, which means a single exercise can surface how different functions — security, legal, communications, leadership — respond to the same incident.
Results and After Action Reports give managers a clear picture of team performance, confidence levels, and where training should focus next.
What you can do
Run exercises from a ready-made catalog. Labs maintains a catalog of expert-built scenarios covering a wide range of attack types, industries, and threat actors. You can use these as-is or copy them as a starting point for customisation.
Build your own scenarios. The Scenario Builder lets you create custom scenarios tailored to your organisation's specific threats, policies, and teams. You can build from scratch, use the AI Scenario Generator to draft a scenario quickly from a prompt, or download any existing scenario to Excel, edit it, and re-import it.
Add the Dynamic AI Feed. The Dynamic AI Feed brings scenarios to life with live incoming emails, news bulletins, social media posts, and AI-powered instant messages that arrive as the exercise unfolds. Participants receive information in real time rather than through static text, which adds urgency and realism to decision-making.
Choose your exercise format. There are three exercise types: single player (individual, own time), drill (role-assigned, team exercise completed asynchronously), and presentation (facilitated live session). See Planning Your Exercise for a full comparison.
Measure and report on performance. View Results gives per-participant and per-inject breakdowns after an exercise. The After Action Report maps team performance to the Crisis Exercise Framework, showing which phases were handled well and where training gaps exist.
Key terminology
Scenarios
A scenario is the story that underpins an exercise. It's made up of injects — decision points — each with a set of options a participant can choose from. Scenarios are templates: you schedule an exercise based on a scenario, and the same scenario can be used for multiple exercises.
Immersive provides a library of prebuilt scenarios. If you have the Crisis Sim Manager platform role, you can also create and publish your own.
Exercises
An exercise is a scheduled, playable instance of a scenario. Exercises can have optional start and end dates, and are assigned to specific participants or teams. There are three types:
- Single player
- Drill
- Presentation
Injects
An inject is a decision point within a scenario. Each inject presents a situation and a set of response options ranked by quality. After a participant selects an option, they receive feedback explaining why it was the best or worst choice. The option they choose can branch the scenario down a different path and affect any performance indicators the scenario tracks.
Navigating the platform
If Crisis Simulations is part of your licence, you'll find it under Exercise in the main navigation menu.
All users see the Assigned to me area, which lists every exercise assigned to you. Use the filters on the left to view exercises by status: not started, in progress, or completed. Select a completed exercise and choose View Results to see your results.
If you hold the Crisis Sim Manager platform role, you'll also see:
- Managed by me — exercises you've assigned to others. Use this to access results and make changes to exercises that haven't started yet.
- All exercises — every exercise running or completed across your organisation.
- Scenario Catalog — all available scenarios, including Immersive prebuilt scenarios and any custom scenarios your organisation has created.