WISE 23 – Delivering one of the largest industry exercises ever

Strengthening resilience of the world’s Financial Services leaders

Hong Kong is renowned the world over as a major center of finance. As one of the leading global hubs, the resilience of its financial services industry is critically important to the region’s economy.

At a time when both the severity and frequency of crises is rising, WISE 2023 represented a timely, necessary opportunity to collectively raise the crisis preparedness of Hong Kong’s most important industry.

Planning & preparation

WISE 2023 involved 7+ months of planning culminating in a single 3-hour simulated exercise involving 1000’s of players in November 2023.

With 42 participant organisations – each with their own plans, procedures and regulatory deliverables – how do you prepare a simulated exercise that puts each and every participant to the test?

Planning began alongside the Hong Kong Financial Services Business Continuity Management (HKFSBCM) Board to establish the core components of the exercise requirements and develop objectives and the scenario at the highest level. Tasked with constructing a simulated exercise that tests all participating organizations, two immediate challenges arose:

Exonaut is 4C Strategies’ proprietary Training and Exercise Management platform, refined over 20 years of use with militaries and global enterprises around the world. In WISE 2023, it offered a portal for Players, Evaluators and Scenario Leads to manage, access and create exercise content, including pseudo media, observations and injects.

Exonaut allowed an unparalleled level of command and control by exercise directors, granting the ability to see the scenario injects listed on dashboards and timeline views before they are sent on by scenario leads.

Exonaut was deployed in conjunction with the three key roles fielded by the participating organisations:

The Scenario leads, responsible for the development and release of scenario injects.

The Evaluation leads, a key role whose responsibility was capturing observations against the exercise objectives.

The Facilitator, the role that ensures the success of the exercise within exercising firms and the single point of contact for all communications.

Achieving a fully immersive experience for 1000’s of players

Many participating organizations elected to exercise their crisis communications team during WISE 2023. To bring the full realities of a sector-wide crisis into the experience, 4C integrated a social media simulator and psuedo-media content into the Exonaut player portal for the duration of the exercise.

This provided an immersive platform that simulated the response to the scenario from both the media and general public. In combination, these additional layers of synthetic reality helped test crisis communications speed and ability to act during a multi-faceted crisis, drafting press releases, response announcements and replying to questions and complaints from the public.

Raising preparedness with organizations & leaders

Take up for the exercise was high amongst the members of the HKFSBCM community. To add to the authenticity of the exercise and to provide regulatory guidance, the WISE 2023 exercise saw the three industry regulators play for the first time ever. As with all exercises of this scale, they aren’t possible without buy-in across the board.

To address these challenges and tackle the sheer scale of WISE 2023, project delivery was broken down into three in-person sprint weeks. These weeks were instrumental, conducted through a series of workshops and briefings in which the 4C methodology of running an exercise was introduced: Design, Develop, Deliver and Evaluate.

These sprint weeks enabled 4C Strategies to engage with the foremost experts for BCM and Operational Resilience in the sector in Hong Kong. These weeks and the feedback from firms’ BCM leads fed into evaluation techniques training and C-Suite level Crisis Management training workshops, a useful means to meaningfully engage with a typically time poor audience. This helped fill in any knowledge gaps and collectively raise the awareness and capability of participant firms to focus on skill sets often lost in the relentless churn of BAU.

More to come

There is much more to come yet on WISE 2023, with post-exercise lessons, a documentary offering behind-the-scenes access, and a full sector-wide capability maturity benchmarking report. Achieved already and perhaps most importantly, though, is the continued promotion of BCM across the wider Hong Kong Financial Services sector.

Keep your eye on this page or 4C Strategies’ social media feeds to know when the documentary is released!