Bare Metal Cyber

Most incident response plans look solid on paper but quickly unravel in reality. They’re usually long, dense documents filled with charts, escalation trees, and legal disclaimers. Someone put hours into aligning them with frameworks and compliance checklists, yet when the alarm actually sounds, no one has the time—or the calm mind—to flip through fifty pages of instructions. Instead, people scramble, improvise, and default to what they remember. And that’s the crux of the issue: people rarely remember the details of documents, no matter how carefully worded they are. Under pressure, binders gather dust, PDFs remain unopened, and carefully written “step six” procedures vanish from thought. What remains is instinct, and instincts are often messy, inconsistent, and misaligned with the strategy leadership intended.

The disconnect becomes obvious in every major breach. A leader, caught in the glare of executives or customers, might choose uptime over containment, gambling with data because the cost of downtime feels too heavy in the moment. A spokesperson, anxious about controlling the narrative, might rush a statement to media without vetting, inadvertently increasing liability. Even seasoned analysts can freeze when multiple alarms flood dashboards, unsure which thread to pull first. These aren’t failures of intelligence or training—they are failures of memory under stress. The human brain doesn’t cling to tidy bullet points; it clings to what feels real. It remembers emotion, dialogue, conflict, and moments that feel lived. Traditional tabletop exercises, unfortunately, rarely provide those visceral anchors, which is why they fade so quickly after they end.

Now picture a different kind of training—a tabletop exercise that plays out like a drama. Instead of reviewing playbooks, participants take on roles, argue over priorities, and face unfolding twists that test their instincts. This is the idea behind a tabletop telenovela: turning incident response planning into a story people remember. Characters embody real-world conflicts—legal liability versus transparency, uptime versus containment—and decisions are made in the heat of the moment, not the comfort of hindsight. Scenes unfold with cliffhangers, forcing quick choices, while injects act like plot twists that raise the stakes. The power of this approach is simple but profound: people don’t just practice the plan; they feel it. And when the real breach hits, what surfaces isn’t vague memory of a document, but the muscle memory of drama lived out in a safe rehearsal.

To make this work, character sheets provide the foundation. Think of them as narrative one-pagers that blend responsibility with motivation. They outline decision rights and escalation chains, but they also introduce tensions and hidden priorities. A Privacy Officer’s sheet might emphasize strict regulatory compliance, while the OT engineer’s sheet stresses production uptime at all costs. A business owner could be driven by fear of revenue loss during a critical launch window, while Legal’s focus lies in shielding the company from lawsuits. These sheets don’t have to be elaborate, but they should be clear enough to prompt players to inhabit the role fully. When these motives collide during the exercise, the debates feel authentic, and the lessons cut deeper than they would in a sterile, checklist-driven run-through. Conflict becomes the teacher, and the IR plan shifts from abstract rules to lived experience.

To amplify the drama, facilitators can introduce motivation cards. These are quick prompts handed out before or during the exercise that add quirks or sudden pressures to each role. Imagine giving the PR lead a card that says, “You crave the spotlight—be the first to break the story.” Or slipping one to the IT administrator that reads, “Your boss told you never to wipe a system image, no matter the risk.” These cues create unpredictability, and participants begin to act less like themselves and more like the characters they are playing. Suddenly, a simple tabletop exercise feels alive, with people improvising dialogue, challenging one another, and wrestling with competing demands. The drama builds naturally, and in the end, the team learns not only what decisions were made, but why. That debrief—unpacking both action and intent—creates richer insights that stick with participants long after the exercise ends. It transforms a boring compliance drill into a rehearsal for reality, one they are far more likely to remember.

Every memorable story has a plot, and an effective tabletop telenovela is no different. A forgettable exercise usually follows a flat arc: someone notices a suspicious alert, the group talks through a response, and everyone checks the compliance box before heading back to work. Nothing about that sequence lingers in memory. To change that, facilitators must craft a narrative with structure and stakes. The best approach is to anchor the plot in real threat intelligence and the organization’s most valuable assets. A financial services team might face a ransomware campaign targeting customer data. A healthcare provider could encounter a medical device compromise that threatens patient safety. A manufacturer may deal with a poisoned supply chain. When the plot ties directly to crown jewels, participants instantly sense the weight of the scenario, and that weight draws them into the story.

From there, the exercise should follow a three-act structure. Act One introduces the setup—an ambiguous signal, a suspicious log, or a regulator’s email asking uncomfortable questions. It’s the calm before the storm, designed to make players lean forward and start piecing together fragments. Act Two escalates the drama. Systems go down, false positives flood dashboards, customers complain on social media, and leadership demands answers. Here, participants must make irreversible decisions under pressure: do they isolate systems and disrupt business continuity, or do they risk keeping them online to preserve uptime? Act Three brings resolution. Either containment is successful, or the breach expands to disclosure, lawsuits, and reputational fallout. The finale doesn’t need to be catastrophic, but it must feel consequential. The resolution teaches that choices made under pressure ripple far beyond the SOC.

To prevent predictability, injects act as the plot twists. These could include a journalist calling with insider information, forcing the communications team into immediate action. A regulator might suddenly demand an official update, testing the clarity of decision-making. A well-intentioned employee could make matters worse by sharing sensitive information outside approved channels. Each twist pushes the team into uncertainty, forcing them to reassess priorities. Conflict across functions becomes the heartbeat of the story: Legal hesitates to disclose, PR fears public backlash, operations wants to stay online. In that clash of motives, the exercise comes alive. Participants feel the pressure, argue their positions, and experience the frustration of limited time and imperfect information. Those emotions are what embed the memory of the lesson. When a real incident later unfolds, people won’t just recall procedures—they’ll recall the urgency, the conflict, and the decisions forged under the heat of a plot they once lived.

The environment where the exercise plays out matters just as much. A carefully staged war room, whether physical or virtual, becomes the central stage. Within it, subchannels simulate the fractured nature of real crisis communication: leadership huddles in one corner, technical responders trade logs in another, legal reviews messaging drafts, and PR wrestles with timing. Injecting controlled chaos into those channels—by flooding them with incomplete information, fake customer complaints, or contradictory system alerts—mimics the confusion of a live incident. Templates for communications, such as prewritten regulator statements or draft social posts, can be pre-staged so that participants experience the pressure of writing under time constraints. By simulating outages or even cutting off a communication channel mid-exercise, facilitators force teams to adapt creatively, reinforcing that flexibility is as important as procedure.

Injects themselves are the pacing mechanism of the narrative. They work best when written as “scene cards” that arrive at just the right moment. Each card contains a cue—perhaps “Help desk reports 50 employees locked out”—paired with evidence and a decision point. A facilitator might hand one card to the Comms Lead announcing that a journalist is asking pointed questions, while another card goes to the Incident Commander about a regulator demanding a briefing. The injects act like rising beats in a drama, keeping participants on edge while forcing them to make choices under imperfect conditions. Clear rules of engagement prevent chaos: players should know how to ask for additional evidence, when a scene can be paused, and how decisions will be recorded. That structure ensures the exercise feels dramatic but controlled, improvisational yet focused. By the time the final scene closes, participants don’t feel like they’ve attended a meeting—they feel like they’ve lived through a breach.

Directing a tabletop telenovela requires the mindset of a showrunner. Even the best scenario will fall flat if pacing is sluggish or energy drifts. A facilitator’s role is not to lecture but to orchestrate, guiding participants through the beats of the story while ensuring tension stays high but not overwhelming. It begins with a strong opening—what filmmakers call the cold open. That might be a sudden phone call about a regulator inquiry, or an unexpected email showing suspicious activity. The goal is to jolt participants out of routine and make them feel, immediately, that something important is at stake. From there, the facilitator manages the rhythm with precision. Every inject is timed, every beat escalates the tension, and cliffhangers keep people leaning forward. When participants feel urgency, when they argue, when they sweat the decision points—that is when learning takes root.

Dialogue is the second lever, and in-character speech is where the drama truly comes alive. If a Communications Lead says, “I need a holding statement in five minutes or the media will bury us,” it lands with far more weight than a detached, “We should think about communications.” In-character dialogue creates immediacy and forces players to embody their roles fully. To capture this richness, facilitators should maintain a visible log—projected in a war room or shared in real time—that records decisions, rationales, and even direct quotes. Later, during the debrief, the facilitator can replay those exact words and ask participants to unpack them. Seeing their own statements in writing creates both accountability and clarity, ensuring the exercise isn’t just an ephemeral conversation but a documented story with tangible lessons.

The value of a tabletop telenovela isn’t just in the drama of the moment—it’s in what sticks afterward. Too many exercises wrap up with vague statements like, “We need to communicate better,” and then everyone returns to business as usual. To make lessons endure, facilitators must capture evidence and measure performance with the same rigor applied to live incidents. That begins with tracking metrics. How long did it take for the team to move from initial detection to triage? How quickly was containment attempted once a threat was identified? Were stakeholders briefed promptly, or did communications lag? These data points create baselines that can be compared across future exercises, transforming a single tabletop into part of a measurable improvement program. More importantly, the act of measuring reinforces that these drills aren’t theater—they are operational rehearsals where performance counts.

But numbers alone don’t etch memories. What participants remember most are the moments—the quote that made everyone laugh, the heated debate between Legal and Operations, the silence that fell when the system “crashed” in the scenario. A skilled facilitator collects these moments like a storyteller. Quotes can be transcribed and displayed, conflicts summarized into key takeaways, and screenshots preserved from virtual chats or slides. These raw materials become storyboards, posters, or highlight reels that circulate long after the exercise ends. Imagine walking into the SOC and seeing a poster titled “Best Lines from the Breach” or receiving a two-minute recap video reminding staff of the exact tensions they once felt. Those artifacts give the exercise a cultural footprint, embedding the memory across the organization.

The final piece is reinforcing lessons through deliberate repetition. Instead of waiting months for the next full drill, leaders can stage micro-exercises drawn from the main scenario. A quick five-minute drill on writing a regulator update, or a ten-minute decision on whether to disclose to customers, keeps muscles sharp. These micro-sessions act like reruns of a favorite show—familiar yet still engaging, reinforcing lessons through repetition. Over time, shorthand develops. Teams start referencing “that time PR went rogue” or “the day Legal froze disclosure” as if they were episodes everyone remembers. Those stories become shared memory, shaping instinct when a real breach occurs. The IR plan is no longer just paperwork—it is a living drama people have felt, argued through, and internalized. That transformation is what ensures resilience when the chaos of an actual incident arrives.

Reinforcement is where a tabletop telenovela becomes more than just a one-time event—it becomes part of organizational culture. Without follow-up, even the most memorable exercise risks fading as daily routines take over. The key is to build continuity, turning single episodes into a series. This can begin with microdrills, short bursts of practice that revisit key decisions from the larger exercise. For instance, a five-minute challenge to draft a regulator response or a ten-minute containment decision embedded into a weekly team meeting. These quick replays remind participants of the lessons they learned, keeping instincts sharp and ensuring that skills don’t atrophy between full-scale sessions. Microdrills don’t need to be complex—they just need to trigger the same urgency and decision-making patterns the main story created.

Another way to reinforce lessons is by rotating roles across exercises. A communications officer might step into the Incident Commander’s shoes, or a technical analyst might try on the role of Legal Counsel. This role-swapping broadens perspective and builds bench strength, so when real crises hit, more people understand the pressures their colleagues face. It also reveals blind spots: the PR lead suddenly realizes how much technical nuance drives messaging, while Legal gains an appreciation for operational urgency. Each rerun with a new cast deepens empathy and sharpens coordination. The story may be the same, but every retelling yields fresh insights, like a well-watched series that reveals new details with each viewing.

As scenarios evolve, they should also scale in complexity. Early exercises might focus on phishing or ransomware, but later ones can escalate to supply chain compromises or insider threats. Each new season of the telenovela challenges the team in fresh ways, layering difficulty while still drawing on familiar characters and conflicts. This progression keeps the narrative engaging and ensures the organization is prepared for a wider spectrum of incidents. Over time, these recurring episodes become part of the company’s folklore. Phrases like “remember when Legal stalled disclosure” or “the day OT refused containment” become cultural shorthand, instantly recalling hard-won lessons. Those references turn into an informal training language that new employees quickly absorb, binding the team through shared story. It’s this storytelling loop—drama, debrief, rerun, and reference—that embeds resilience deep into the organization.

Most organizations already know that paper plans rarely hold up under the stress of a real incident. What they need is a way to make those plans unforgettable, so that when adrenaline spikes and the clock ticks down, muscle memory takes over. The tabletop telenovela is that tool. By weaving drama, conflict, and character into training, it transforms an exercise from a compliance requirement into a lived experience. People remember the roles they played, the arguments they had, and the decisions they made under pressure. Those memories surface later when it matters most, guiding instinct in the heat of a real breach. The plan stops being something that lives in a binder and becomes something that lives in people.

The legacy of this approach is resilience built through story. A single well-run tabletop telenovela can spark a culture shift, encouraging teams to rehearse, rerun, and refine together. Over time, the organization develops its own canon of crisis “episodes,” complete with lessons, catchphrases, and cautionary tales. That shared narrative becomes a kind of plot armor, protecting the team when the next real threat arrives. And in the end, that’s the point: turning paperwork into preparation, and preparation into survival.