A crisis simulation exercise gives people an opportunity to practise responding to a serious incident in a controlled learning environment. Participants work through a realistic scenario, consider the information available and make decisions as the situation develops.
For emergency services and other save-life organisations, those decisions can involve competing priorities, incomplete information and the need to work with other agencies. An exercise creates space to explore that thinking before people face the consequences of a real incident.
What happens in a Hydra exercise?
Hydra creates immersive scenarios designed around your organisation's learning needs. Scenarios have included major incidents, murder investigations, terrorist events and multi-agency child protection investigations.
Participants work in small groups, known as syndicates. They discuss the unfolding incident and record their decisions. The decision logs capture the group's thinking as the exercise develops, giving facilitators material to explore in subsequent discussions.
Groups also come together in plenary sessions. With facilitators and subject matter experts, they compare decisions and examine the reasons behind them. Different responses to the same information can provide a useful starting point for discussion: what did each group notice, assume or prioritise?
Read more about the Hydra methodology and our immersive crisis simulation service.
What can teams practise?
The learning objectives should guide the exercise. Depending on the participants and scenario, useful questions might include:
- What information do we need before making this decision?
- Which assumptions are influencing our response?
- How do our responsibilities connect with those of another team or agency?
- How can we explain the reasons for our decision?
- What would cause us to reconsider our approach?
These are examples to help frame a learning discussion. An exercise needs to reflect the roles, experience and professional responsibilities of the people taking part.
The College of Policing describes its Hydra facilitators course in terms of creating dilemmas and giving delegates an opportunity to make considered decisions without real-world consequences.
What makes an exercise useful?
Realistic content gives participants something meaningful to work with. Clear learning objectives and thoughtful facilitation help them examine what happened and why.
A useful planning conversation starts with five questions:
- What do you want participants to learn? Identify the decisions or working relationships you want to explore.
- Who needs to take part? Consider which roles and perspectives the scenario needs, including partner agencies where relevant.
- What situation will bring those objectives into focus? Choose a scenario that gives participants a reason to discuss the issues you want to examine.
- Who will facilitate the learning? Plan how discussions will be supported and which subject matter expertise will be needed.
- What will happen afterwards? Allow time to reflect on the exercise and decide how relevant learning will be carried forward.
Simulation design is also a subject of continuing research. A 2025 peer-reviewed paper on police learning examines how Hydra simulation design can align with established standards from healthcare education. Its focus is the design of learning experiences; it does not establish a guaranteed improvement in operational outcomes.
Where do exercises take place?
A Hydra Suite provides a permanent environment on your premises for immersive learning. Hydra Presence supports remote participation and national collaboration. The appropriate setup depends on your participants, delivery team and learning needs.
Explore Hydra suite installation or Hydra Presence to learn about the options. Universities also use Hydra for applied learning: see our university partnerships.
How does debriefing connect with simulation?
Reflection helps participants examine the decisions made during an exercise. Hydra also provides a separate service, 10kV debriefing, which uses anonymous contributions to support discussion and organisational learning. Learning from 10kV debriefs can feed back into future Hydra exercises.
Planning an exercise for your organisation
Start with what you want your team to learn. We can discuss the scenario, delivery environment and support your organisation needs. If you are developing your own delivery team, explore the Hydra Facilitators Course.