Incident Tabletop Exercise Script
Run a safe simulation of an outage.
Added October 15, 2026. Written with AI assistance and checked for clarity and placeholders; not reviewed by a lawyer, accountant, clinician or other professional. How these prompts are made
The Open buttons send the prompt text as currently shown below to that site only when you click. Fill in the placeholders first.
Write a tabletop exercise script for [SERVICE_OR_SCENARIO]. Participants and roles: [PARTICIPANTS]. Time available: [TIME_AVAILABLE]. Past incidents to draw from: [PAST_INCIDENTS]. Design a 60-minute scenario in injects: the initial symptom, a second complication at minute 15, a communication challenge at minute 30, and a twist at minute 45. For each inject write the facts the facilitator reads out, questions for participants, and the expected good behaviours. Include a facilitator guide covering ground rules (no blame, no real systems touched), timekeeping, and how to capture observations. Provide an evaluation form and a template for turning observations into action items. Suggest three variations for later exercises. Add a debrief agenda of 15 minutes with four questions, and a checklist for preparing the exercise a week ahead, including inviting observers, preparing the injects, and confirming that no real alerts will be triggered. Provide a short handout for participants that explains the rules and their roles, and a note about adapting the scenario for a small team. Add the full text of the four injects for one invented scenario so the facilitator can run it without further preparation: a gradual rise in checkout errors, a second symptom in a dependent search service, a customer posting publicly about the outage, and a discovery that the last deploy included a configuration change nobody reviewed. For each inject write the exact words the facilitator reads, three discussion questions, and the behaviours that indicate the team is working well, such as naming a commander, writing down hypotheses, and checking recent changes first. Add a scoring sheet of ten observable behaviours rated from not seen to consistently seen, and a template for turning the three lowest-scoring behaviours into action items with owners and dates. Close with a plan for the follow-up thirty days later: which action items were completed, whether the same behaviours appear in a short repeat exercise, and who reports the result.
Fill in before use
Optional: type your details and the prompt above updates. Nothing is saved or sent.
Replace each bracketed placeholder with your own details, then paste into Any AI or another assistant.