This myth is generally invoked during exercises when responders are stressed out, and seek to shift the blame for their shortcomings. Additionally, it is often quoted during the evaluation stage of the exercise, when participants try to justify delays in decision-making, erroneous approach to stakeholders and / or poor analysis of potential dilemmas.
Unquestionably, an exercise imposes a degree of artificiality but, time and again, people seem to genuinely believe that the facilitator is making things exaggeratedly difficult, to better prepare future responders. They ingenuously think that more and better information would certainly be available when a real incident occurs.
There is no doubt that during an actual incident and / or crisis there will be a great deal of information flowing around but, unlike an exercise, it will arrive at random times, via numerous different kinds of media, and much of it will be lost, delayed or corrupted from the source. The vast majority of this information will be completely irrelevant, and simply create more ‘noise’; much of it will be inaccurate or ambiguous, and different sources will often contradict each other. These facts should be widely known and understood, particularly by people who have personal experience in managing a real crisis.
Always keep in mind that during exercises, decision-making will not have consequences for you nor will it affect your Organization at all, it is just a part of the essential learning process to improve personnel competencies and response team capacity. Exercises are the only way to evaluate response performance. Practice is everything.
