Crisis Cabinet: The Emergency Board Meeting
It is 8:47am. Your company is trending for all the wrong reasons, and in fifteen minutes your board faces the press. Teams scramble to agree a response, then stand up and take hostile questions from a class that smells blood. Nothing teaches stakeholder management faster.
How to run it
Each team is the board of a company. Assign roles: CEO, Finance Director, Operations Director, Communications Director (plus HR Director and Legal Advisor in bigger teams). Hand each team ONE crisis card. They must not show it to other teams yet.
Boards have 15 minutes to agree: (1) immediate action in the next 24 hours, (2) what they will say publicly, (3) what it will cost and how they will fund it, (4) how they protect each stakeholder group: customers, staff, shareholders, suppliers. Every director must own one part of the plan.
Each board stands at the front. The CEO gives a 60-second statement, then the class becomes the press pack for 3 minutes of questions. Encourage journalist personas: tabloid reporter, financial analyst, angry customer representative, union rep. Every board member must answer at least one question.
The class scores each board on the rubric (below) out of 20. The teacher may add or subtract up to 3 points for realism. Highest score keeps their jobs; lowest score faces a shareholder revolt (dramatic groan from the class).
Reveal which real crises inspired the scenarios and what those companies actually did (notes on each card). Compare: did the student boards do better or worse than reality? KFC's cheeky apology usually beats most student plans, which is a lesson in itself.
🖨 5 crisis scenario cards (real-inspired; reveal the inspiration only at the end)
| Card | Your crisis | Real inspiration (teacher reveal) |
|---|---|---|
| 1. The empty shelves. | You run a national fried chicken chain. A botched switch to a new delivery company means most of your 900 restaurants have NO CHICKEN. Social media is roasting you. Franchisees are furious about lost income. | KFC UK, 2018: a delivery contract switch left most UK stores closed. KFC responded with a joking apology advert rearranging its initials, widely praised for honesty and humour. |
| 2. The data breach. | You run a broadband and mobile company. Hackers have stolen personal details of over 150,000 customers, including bank details for thousands. News breaks tonight. Your systems were known to be dated. | TalkTalk, 2015: a cyber attack exposed data of about 157,000 customers. Criticised for a slow, confused response; fined a then-record £400,000 and lost around 100,000 customers. |
| 3. The CEO's joke. | You run a famous high-street jewellery chain. At a black-tie dinner your CEO joked that your products are cheap because they are total rubbish. A journalist recorded it. The clip is everywhere by morning and customers feel insulted. | Gerald Ratner, 1991: his crap joke about Ratners products wiped roughly £500m off the company value. Shops were renamed Signet to survive. The Ratner effect is now a business term. |
| 4. The product recall. | You make a hugely popular smartphone. Reports are flooding in that some units overheat and a few have caught fire on planes. Airlines are starting to ban your device. Peak sales season starts in three weeks. | Samsung Galaxy Note 7, 2016: overheating batteries led to a global recall and the model being scrapped, costing billions. Praised for the eventual full recall, criticised for a slow, confusing start. |
| 5. The horse in the lasagne. | You are the board of a supermarket chain. Testing has found that some of your budget beef ready meals contain horse meat from a supplier three steps down your supply chain. The story breaks tomorrow. | UK horsemeat scandal, 2013: several supermarkets were affected. Tesco took out full-page newspaper apologies and promised closer supplier checks. Trust in supply chains became a national conversation. |
🖨 Press conference scoring rubric (class scores each board /20)
| Category | 0-5 points |
|---|---|
| Speed and clarity: Was the immediate action decisive and realistic? | |
| Honesty: Did they own the problem or dodge and blame? | |
| Stakeholders: Were customers, staff, shareholders AND suppliers all considered? | |
| Grace under fire: How well did the board handle hostile questions? |
Variations
- Twist injection: halfway through planning, hand each board a second slip (e.g. a whistleblower has just gone to the press, or your share price has fallen 20% this morning) and watch them adapt.
- Swap the press: give three students secret journalist briefs with one killer question each, planted in advance.
- A-Level write-up: students produce a 9-12 mark exam answer evaluating their own board's response against the real company's response.
Teacher tips
- Keep the 15-minute planning clock visible and merciless. Time pressure is what makes boards prioritise like real executives.
- Coach the press pack briefly: good questions start with specifics (How many customers? What will it cost? Who resigns?).
- The Ratner card is gold for A-Level classes: it opens brand value, shareholder confidence and the price of a single sentence.
The Business School is a live simulation where your class runs rival firms for a full lesson — pricing wars, hiring, crises, negotiations. Free teacher demo, no installs, students join with a PIN.