Exercises: Crisis Management
Part A recall · Part B application · Part C field work · Part D critique · Part M mixed review · Part E extension.
Starred (★) problems have worked answers in appendices/answers-to-selected.md.
Part A — Recall and Comprehension
A.1 ★ Name the three kinds of crisis. Which error is commonest, and which is most damaging?
A.2 List the five parts of a rain plan. Which is almost always missing from a real one?
A.3 How is the decision deadline calculated? Give the general method, not the Reyes–Whitfield number.
A.4 ★ The evidence at the deadline is genuinely 50/50. Which way do you go, and state the asymmetry in one sentence.
A.5 Why should the named decider not be the couple? Give the reason in the planner's own words.
A.6 State the four substitutability categories with one example each.
A.7 ★ Name the four category-D vendors and, for each, the one thing that must exist in advance.
A.8 Give the ten-minute no-show sequence in order.
A.9 What is the single rule for medical incidents, and what three things does it explicitly rule out?
A.10 After the emergency call, what is step 2, and why is it specific to rural venues?
A.11 ★ List four things a planner can do about family conflict and four they cannot.
A.12 What are the four elements of telling a couple something has happened, in order?
A.13 What is the working rule that resolves the fourth-clause conflict in a medical case?
A.14 Name the six containment steps for an unsolvable crisis. Which is the actual service?
A.15 ★ What is a second-order failure, and why is it invisible?
A.16 Distinguish late and in contact, late with no contact, and absent. What is the response to the middle one, and why?
A.17 Which of the four weathers produces a genuine safety stop, and who owns that call?
A.18 In a heat emergency, what is the most effective mitigation and what does it cost?
A.19 Name the three things people present as crises that are not. What does responding to them cost?
A.20 ★ What goes in an incident note, and give the three reasons it exists.
Part B — Application
B.1 ★ A garden ceremony at 3:00 p.m., 80 guests, alternative is a conservatory that seats 60. Moving takes 70 minutes with three people. Guests arrive at 2:30. Compute the decision deadline and state what the 60-vs-80 shortfall obliges you to do at the deadline.
B.2 Write the rain plan for a venue whose only indoor alternative is the same room the dinner is in. The reset between ceremony and dinner is 45 minutes. All five parts.
B.3 ★ Build a full substitutability playbook for a 120-guest wedding with: caterer, bar, DJ, photographer, videographer, florist, cake maker, minibus, marquee company, and officiant. Assign each to A–D and write category D in full.
B.4 It is 4:02. The photographer has not arrived and does not answer. The ceremony is at 4:30. Write your first ten minutes with times, actions, and the words you say.
B.5 The DJ arrives having brought no music for the ceremony, only the reception set. Give three responses at three cost levels and say which you take and why.
B.6 ★ A guest collapses during the speeches. Write the first ninety seconds: every action, who does it, and what you say to the room — including whether you say anything to the room at all.
B.7 The bride's divorced parents have been seated three tables apart per the plan. At 8:40 the father has moved to the mother's table and both are visibly upset. Write what you do, in physical actions only, with no dialogue.
B.8 Write the message the named decider sends to a couple at the weather deadline, choosing the indoor option against a forecast the couple believe is improving. Under 90 words.
B.9 ★ Compute the degradation ladder for a $60,000 wedding: for each of music, food, photography, flowers, light, cake, and sound, give the full, degraded, and floor version with a rough cost for each.
B.10 At 2:50 the marquee company's supervisor says the wind is above their limit and the marquee must come down. The couple are 20 minutes from the ceremony. What do you do, in order, and what is not negotiable?
B.11 Write the incident note for B.6. Complete, factual, and under 250 words.
B.12 ★ Four things happen at once: a category-A failure, a category-D failure, a person in distress, and something that is not a crisis at all. Invent them, order your response, and state what you are dropping.
B.13 Write the post-crisis conversation script for a crisis you caused: the run sheet said 6:30 for the speeches and the caterer was told 7:00, and the food sat for twenty-five minutes. Full script.
B.14 The officiant is 40 minutes away with no car and the ceremony is in 50 minutes. Give three parallel actions, and say which one you take yourself.
Part C — Field and Practice
C.1 Find a wedding venue's website and identify its wet-weather alternative. Then compute what it seats and compare that to the venue's stated capacity. Most venues do not publish the first number.
C.2 ★ Interview a planner about the worst thing that has happened at an event of theirs. Ask specifically what they dropped while dealing with it. Most will not have thought about it.
C.3 Take a real or planned event and write the emergency page from Chapter 26. Time yourself. Then note how many of the fields you could not fill in without asking somebody.
C.4 Look up the actual response time for emergency services to a rural address you know. Then decide whether that changes anything you would do.
C.5 ★ Write your own degradation ladder for the service you offer. Include the floor column. Then notice your resistance to writing it.
C.6 Ask three caterers what happens if they cannot come. Record the answers verbatim and classify each as a real answer, a reassurance, or a non-answer.
C.7 Find out where the fire exits, extinguishers, and assembly point are at a venue you know. Four minutes. Then ask whether the venue would have told you unprompted.
Part D — Critique and Judgment
D.1 §28.2 claims the deadline should be set by physical work, backward. A venue with a permanent indoor alternative and no move required has no physical work. Does the deadline concept survive? Rewrite it if not.
D.2 ★ §28.3 recommends the planner be the decider. Argue the opposite case as strongly as you can. Then say whether the chapter's position survives your argument.
D.3 The four substitutability categories put the videographer in C — not replaceable, event survives. Some couples would say the event does not survive it. Is the category wrong, or is the framework about the event rather than about the couple? Defend a position.
D.4 ★ §28.5's rule — call immediately, before checking — will produce unnecessary ambulances. Estimate how many, and decide whether the rule is still right. State what evidence would change your answer.
D.5 §28.6 says a planner cannot fix a family. The chapter offers no evidence for this and it is stated with unusual confidence. What kind of claim is it, and how would you test it?
D.6 §28.8 argues against trying to solve unsolvable crises. Is "containment" a real distinction, or a way of relabelling helplessness? Argue both.
D.7 ★ The chapter's opening scene has no villain and no error. Is that a fair representation of crises at weddings, or has the chapter chosen the easy case? Count the examples in the chapter and classify each by whether somebody was at fault.
D.8 §28.9 says do not lead with an apology if you did nothing wrong. This is professionally common advice and it is also how institutions avoid accountability. Where is the line?
D.9 The book has now recommended, in Chapters 12, 25, 26, 27, and 28, that things be written down in advance. Estimate the total hours this represents for one wedding. Is it proportionate to a $42,000 event? Show your arithmetic.
Part M — Mixed Review
M.1 (Ch.10, 13) The barn's rain-plan capacity has been an open finding since Chapter 10. Why did it stay open for eighteen chapters? Name the specific mechanism, not the oversight.
M.2 ★ (Ch.25) A vendor is 90 minutes late. Use the cascade to determine whether this is a crisis at all, and state the two facts you need to answer it.
M.3 (Ch.26) Which four fields from the emergency page does §28.5 need in the first ninety seconds?
M.4 (Ch.27) Which triage question kills each of §28.5b's three non-crises?
M.5 ★ (Ch.9) A guest is injured and it may become a claim. What did Chapter 9 say must be true for the claim to work, and what does §28.9 add?
M.6 (Ch.15) A guest is drunk and upset at 9:20. Which chapter owns the drink, which owns the person, and who has refusal authority?
M.7 (Ch.20) The officiant cannot come. Which of Chapter 20's five legal questions now determines whether a wedding happens today?
M.8 ★ (Ch.14) Marisol Vega's nut allergy was managed at dinner. Name three later service points where the protocol lapses, and say which chapter should have caught each.
M.9 (Ch.18) Power fails at 8:15. What runs on battery, what does not, and what is the first thing a guest notices?
M.10 (Ch.22, 23) An MC brief and a photographer's contract both contain a line that matters in a crisis. Name both.
M.11 ★ (Ch.1, 8, 12, 26) The Harvest & Thyme no-show has now been visited five times. List what each visit added, and say whether the book kept its promise to solve it here.
M.12 (Ch.19) Signage in a rain plan. What has to change, who changes it, and how long does the chapter budget for it?
Part E — Extension and Synthesis
E.1 ★ Chapter 27's decision protocol and §28.3's named decider both remove decisions from the couple. Write the strongest possible objection from a couple's point of view — that they have been managed out of their own wedding — and then answer it honestly, including any part of the objection you concede.
E.2 Build a general crisis framework for a domain other than weddings — a conference, a restaurant opening, a hospital ward handover. Keep the three kinds and the substitutability categories, and see what breaks. Report what did not transfer.
E.3 ★ §28.8's unsolvable crisis and §28.4's playbook are addressed to different faculties: one is preparation, one is character. Write 800 words on whether crisis management can be taught at all, using this chapter as your evidence and being specific about which parts you think are teachable.
E.4 Design the measurement that would test §28.4a's claim that second-order failures are what people remember. Be specific about what you would record and what would falsify it.
E.5 Research an actual major event failure — a festival, a conference, a public event — with published findings. Map it onto this chapter's three kinds and four categories. Report where the mapping fails.
E.6 ★ The chapter recommends deciding in advance that you will use your safety authority, because "nobody improvises courage at 9:40 p.m." Write the decision, for yourself, in advance, as a paragraph you would actually stand behind — including the specific circumstances in which you would stop an event you are being paid to run.
📐 Mini-Project
Take an event you know — real or planned — and build its crisis documentation in full:
- The weather plan, all four weathers, with the deadline arithmetic for each
- The substitutability playbook, every vendor assigned, category D prepared
- The degradation ladder, with the floor column
- The emergency page (Chapter 26's, if it does not exist)
- The named crew for the alternative, and evidence they have been told
- Your safety decision from E.6
Then time yourself. Report the total, and answer D.9 with your own number.
And do one more thing: show the playbook to the person who would have to execute it if you were not there. Note every question they ask. Each one is a gap.