War Room Design: Training Leaders to Decide Under Pressure - A conversation with Scott Campbell

0:00We're on a mission to create a million different light bulb moments. The design of the simulation is to try and get people to become more self-aware.

0:24Hello, everyone. This is Belen Santaolalla from Conductor, crisis exercise platform. You're listening to the Crisis Designer podcast, where we explore ideas, practices, and tools that help you create meaningful crisis management exercises. So if you're working crisis response, business continuity, reputational risk, or immersive simulations in general, this show is for you. Today, we're joined by Scott Campbell, leadership, reputation, and crisis expert with over 20

1:03years of experience helping leaders perform under pressure. Scott is the founder of Nexus, where he builds fully immersive high-stack simulations that strengthen decision-making, collaboration, and crisis readiness. He works across public and private sectors, supporting executives, boards, and ministerial leaders through complex challenges. As the seasoned coach and former senior executive himself, Scott specializes in turning pressure into clarity, confidence, and effective action.

1:36Scott, welcome to the Crisis Designer podcast. How are you today? Hi, Belen. Yeah, I'm well. Thank you. Well, thanks for the introduction. I don't know whether I feel old or what, but I can't. Experienced. Thanks very much. Experienced. Experienced. Experienced. Great. Okay. So let's get started. My first question is always about your relationship with your clients. So how do you help your clients through Nexus and also your consultancy strategically?

2:07In a number of ways, really. I think people call me a Mr. Fix-It. I think generally I see people in some of their worst moments, either they're in a crisis or they're about to be in a crisis, or they've just been in one. And then my role is really to come in and often see the things that they might miss and ask the questions that they might not want to ask themselves. Or as you'll know, and as the listeners will know, when you're in that crisis, you're just

2:40in tunnel vision and it's really hard to see outside. And so, you know, my job often is to go in and provide that fresh set of eyes. And then I work with clients from there on rebuilding and recovery. And I guess my background is in communication. So I have a keen interest in communications and engagement. But really, I'm a problem solver. And that's the work that we do in the consulting side. And then when it comes to Nexus, as you talked about, Nexus, the war room experience, is all

3:13about building better decision makers and more confident leaders so that in those moments that matter, they're able to make really good decisions. Great. So because that was my next question. Why is your work in leadership under pressure and crisis communication so important today? Do you know, I think because we get taught how to make a decision when we're young, right? Don't touch the fire because it's hot and you'll get burned. Don't jump in the ice because it's really cold.

3:45These sorts of things. And then we go through our career and we might become senior leaders or we become decision makers in your role. And often you're not actually supported in how to make a decision. We just expect people to make decisions and know how to do it. Now, when you're in really high stakes environments like the police and the army and even surgeons, you get regular training. But outside of those types of environments, you don't get the high pressure types of training on a regular basis that I think is really important.

4:18And yet those people who are leaders in corporate organizations and even not-for-profit organizations and obviously around governments are constantly making decisions that have a potential impact on people and property and place. And so, for me, it's about helping people to understand what it really feels like in that moment.

4:41And so that when they get there, they understand. You know, I'm driven by a saying that the U.S. Marines have, which is that when you are training, you want to train at the same intensity or slightly above what you're going to find on the battlefield, so that when you get there, you know what it's like. And I think we're taking some of that type of thinking and bringing it into business as usual, so that people understand what that moment feels like. Got it. And how did you first get into this crisis leadership realm?

5:18Yeah, once upon a time, I was a journalist, so going back a number of years now.

5:23And I was a journalist who looked after the police round, and then I went on international visits. I was in East Timor when there was a military coup, a number of military coup in Fiji, Solomon Islands. I got a real understanding of what it was like to be in that type of disaster zone. And then since then, as a consultant, I've been involved here in New Zealand in Akari White

5:56Island, which was one of our volcanoes that erupted in 2019, killing a number of people. I've been involved in cyber attacks, in a whole range of different crises. So I've sort of just organically gone through that over the last 20 years, and it's got me to this place now where I'm able to help train others to do it. So I got here through experience, I guess. And then in the last sort of three or four years, I've been in research to really drill

6:30into the behavioural science behind it all as well. Nice. And how did you end up coming up with the idea of designing a war room where to train leaders? Because I've been in a number of them, and I think I've sat and just watched what pressure does to people in those moments, and how I think we can train for, and we don't really train for intensity like you find in a war room.

7:01And so what I thought I would test is whether or not by training just regularly at that type of intensity and the cognitive overload part and introducing noise and introducing change and a human dynamic and emotion and these types of things to the war room. And that really got me thinking about, you know, I had seen that in the real world, and so I wanted to make it into a training simulation.

7:32So again, like so that people can come and experience it, and they know what it's going to feel like when they get that phone call. Yeah. So how does it work? What does your war room look like, and how do you design an experience to happen there? So it's loosely based on the situation room in the bunker of the White House, and I don't know if you've seen the program Designated Survivor, where they have the bunker and it's really

8:03over the top. Think of that. Almost think of an escape room as well, too. So people come into the experience, and everything in it is designed to be there. Everything from the lighting to the ambient sound to where we put things like cups and the types of laptops that people are using. There's a big clock in the corner, a countdown clock, those types of things. Things that really set a trigger once you're under pressure.

8:37So people come in, they're there for three to four hours, depending on how the scenario is going. And in the war room, there's no windows. It's almost like you're in an interrogation room. You've got the big screen TV with breaking news that's popping up on it. You've got the laptops with conductor running all of our virtual environment. Yeah, that's what it feels like. And the moment you walk in, you're in the experience, and people are there. There's no real finish

9:13or end to it. We keep going for as long as people are still learning, or we basically get to a point of saying, actually, you've reached that end, so let's do a debrief. Got it. Great. And as a communications expert, how do you design an exercise to happen there? Where do you start? Where does the spark come from when you start designing the exercise? So most of it comes from real life crises. So one of our natural disasters, for example,

9:51is based on an earthquake that is a one in 200 year earthquake that will hit New Zealand at some time in the next 50 years. And so I've looked at what happened during the Christchurch earthquakes, which were really major earthquakes in New Zealand. I've designed or we've designed that natural disaster based on the emergency plan that our National Emergency Management Agency is preparing for. And so it's a replica of the real thing. And I think for us, we want to have that intensity

10:25there. But then the critical principle of it all is that you have to be able to learn. And so we're not simply putting people under pressure for the sake of it. It's enough pressure that they can learn. And I think the key thing for us is that we're able, we then drill into the individual who's in the room as well. And so we're constantly changing throughout the simulation, how it's impacting on each of the different individuals in the room. So I guess we take it from real life examples,

11:02we then can add in a bit of gamification. And so, you know, as I'm sure, and Conduct has given some great examples of this previously, but, you know, some people get different information from other people. We take people out of a room for a little while. So all of these things are being designed to put people under pressure, but also hope that they can learn to communicate with each other, to connect with each other around the room, and I guess collaborate. And then the key for us is that

11:40we're on a mission to create a million different light bulb moments. And what I mean by that is that inside the room, the design of the simulation is to try and get people to become more self-aware, aware, and then aware of their colleagues, how they're working together. So yeah, we bring all of those things together, including media, staff engagement, engagement with the board of directors,

12:12obviously everything that Conduct has to offer through the environment, virtual environment, environment. And then we have facilitators with them. And so all of that comes together. Often we design by simply starting with a blank, literally a blank canvas. And we just, there's normally two or three of us, and we just think, if this disaster happened, what are the types of things that might happen? And then what are the types of things that could, I guess, bring a bit more energy to the

12:44simulation?

12:50It's kind of a script writer's room, right? Brainstorming what the story is going to be like. Yeah, absolutely. So we end up with, you know, if you can think of a whiteboard on the wall, and you're almost going through 24 to 48 hours of this happens, and then that happens, and we might throw something in here. And it's a lot of it is based on experience. And then what could happen?

13:21We're constantly asking that question, what are the types of things that might happen? So in our earthquake scenario, for example, we bring in an online scam, where people have started using Facebook, Facebook, and X, and they are putting out posts about, you know, donate to this, give a little page.

13:49So those types of things, which people might not necessarily think about when you're in the midst of a crisis. But again, it's just something different that gets people thinking. Gotcha. And how much do they know before coming to the war room? Because I was thinking that if you're just connecting one crisis to another, and it's like, maybe something starts, like an incident starts, like a red herring, but the actual crisis is something else, like you mentioned, with the online scam, how much do they know? Are they aware what the crisis is going to be about? Or how much

14:21do they know before they come to the room? No, they don't. Most of the people who have been through Nexus and had the experience know about that much. Nothing, nothing at all. Zero. And I guess we do that on purpose. So if they're smart, they've looked at the website, and they've had a good look at what they might be expecting.

14:42But the whole, the whole thing, as you well know, in a real crisis, you don't know what's coming next. And so, you know, at the start of the simulation, we give a pretty thorough health and safety briefing. Because the intensity inside the war room, look, it can get really intense. And so we want people to be in a really safe environment. That's really important for us. This is a controlled and safe environment. So they come in, and then, like I say, the minute they walk through the door,

15:14they're actually in the simulation. They don't quite know it yet. And then we do the health and safety briefing. And then they understand, okay, something is, something major is going to be happening today. And then we get into it. And how do you put their decision making skills to the test? How do you encourage them to make decisions? And how do their decisions make an impact on the story? How does that happen?

15:45Yeah, I'm, I'm not sure in Europe, whether or not you had those books called pick a path books. Yeah. So yeah, so you're on adventure. Correct. So, so this is partly in my mind when we're designing the different scenarios. So we have a book that you can read from beginning to end. And you could just go through the whole book. But the way I like it is that they can jump all around the scenario. And, and so we've developed our scenarios a bit like that. So it's, it's not necessarily a template, we can move it around.

16:20So they might do the staff engagement first, rather than doing a media interview. Or we insert different interjects throughout the simulation, just so that we are forcing them in some ways into that decision making that you that you talk about. Things like we, so we've got an active shooter scenario. And one of the things they have to think about without giving too many secrets, easily. But one of the things they have to think about is whether or not they should be giving advice to

16:55people in this mall. Is that their job? And if they are going to do that, are they then exposing the police and the staff and the customers to further harm? So those are the types of decisions that they might be making. During the natural disaster, they have to ask a really critical question right at the start. And some groups will ask it within five minutes. Other groups will take 45 minutes to ask the same question. And it's a key

17:28decision because that actually then gives them the information to start to become more confident in the scenario. Now, if they're not quite getting there, we will then use either email or the messenger inside conductor. And we'll just prompt them with questions from their staff or a colleague. And that helps prompt their decision making. Nice. And what's the role of personas in all this, like this actors, characters that are

18:02making the story come alive? How do you create them, design them, make them alive? Yeah. So we, although we don't tell people, the participants, when they're coming into the war room, what role they should play, what persona they should be, during the health and safety briefing, we encourage them to think about having a chief executive and a chief operating officer and a communications person, and probably a chief people officer. And so we encourage them to that. And they often get

18:39there. And then we create personas around them who might be their chief legal aide, who is sitting with our master controller. And they might be one of the people who starts interacting with them. Outside of the room, we then have real life actors who are journalists. We have somebody who's the staff person. We have a police officer and the active shooter. We have different actors who play the media

19:09in a press conference environment. We have a minister of the government, the crown. Everyone. So I think it comes back to one of your earlier questions around how we're designing the scenario. We are anticipating what they might think is coming in the simulation. And then we will introduce personas that are there inside the simulation. And if we need to, we introduce more

19:40people throughout. So we are constantly monitoring their messages between each other. We have live stream cameras in the room. And so myself as a facilitator and another floating facilitator will constantly be listening to what they're talking about. And so some groups, for example, might say, we don't want to do a media interview at the moment amongst each other. And so then we will introduce

20:11the persona of the board chair. And the board chair has now asked the chief executive to do an interview because our share price is crashing. So yeah, we will use different personas to try and keep them moving. For us, I guess, the decision about personas is really how to keep the momentum going. So that at any point during the simulation, things are moving. There's not a lot of time where there's downtime throughout the simulation.

20:41Got it. And you were mentioning before about facilitation. How many facilitators and how do you deal with facilitation in this type of environment? So we have, so myself, I'll be one of the lead facilitators. And then depending on what the simulation or the scenario is that we're doing on that day, we'll have another facilitator who is from that environment. So if you think about natural disaster, we have somebody who is an emergency manager. If you think about the active shooter

21:16scenario, we have somebody who's a former police operator. In our cyber attack scenario, we've got people who are ethical hackers. And we try to match people up. We've got a clinical psychologist. We've got another behavioral scientist. So people who can actually give both subjective feedback, but then also really specific feedback to that scenario. And we think that's really important because what we are trying to do is create an

21:50environment where people can learn and then transfer that knowledge. The transfer of the knowledge to their actually business as usual is really important to us. We're not designing a workshop that is a three hour workshop. We're designing the start of a leadership program. So that this is about ongoing learning. So they take that away in their business as usual, they get learnings from it. And then they can transfer that into a crisis if they're ever in one. The other thing with our facilitators

22:22is that we give people three lifelines. So if they are struggling, then they can ask for help. Otherwise, we might just stop them every now and then during the scenario and say, hey, why don't you think about this? Or let's take a moment team just to stop for a second, regather our thoughts and start again. And it becomes really critical at the end because we have

22:53the participants do a debrief themselves for 15 to 20 minutes. And that is seriously some of the most powerful debrief and feedback that these groups have had because they can talk really candid about what's just happened without it being a personal personal attack on one of their colleagues. So that's a really beautiful thing. And then we do a debrief after as well. So this is where we

23:25introduce the facilitator at the end to then, I guess, wrap up the workshop. What's the next steps now? Like the day after where them is trying to implement that and obviously

23:46make that learning actionable. But do they come back to the room? Is it like a frequent training thing or how does it look like? Is it something that is part of a program? Hopefully, they'll come back. Hopefully, we haven't scared them away. So the idea is for it to be an ongoing learning program. And so we are currently creating what's called the Nexus Academy. And so we look at it from a beginner, intermediate and then expert level. And so

24:24throughout those different levels, we will up the intensity. And to the point where by the time they're at that expert level, they really should be able to find themselves in a state of flow pretty quickly. They get really detailed feedback both as a team and then as an individual with areas to focus on and to work on. And then they have access to a whole bunch of resources that we have, whether that's white papers or different types of presentations, and at some point we'll have a

25:01Nexus podcast and those types of things going. Got it. Great. Okay. And can you tell us a little bit about one of the most challenging scenarios that you had to prepare, put together?

25:16I think the active shooter is a really, for us, was quite a challenging scenario to put together. And because for listeners or people who have been involved in the police in particular, or an emergency involving an active shooter, most often the active shooter part is fairly short at the start. So I think something like the majority of active shooter incidents in the United States, for example,

25:48lasts for about eight to 10 minutes. That's the actual shooting part that happens, right? And so that's not going to fill up a scenario. And so what we then have to think about is, okay, how do we introduce the scenario? And as you talked about earlier, there's a bit of a red hearing at the start. We create an environment where they come into it and they think the scenario might be there. And then the active shooting starts. Now, for most people, you're probably only

26:2330, 20 to 30 minutes into the simulation by the time you get to a point where police have now taken over. So we had to think about, well, what do they do for the next two and a half hours? What are the types of things that they might actually be doing? And so that really challenged us. And I think what we did with that simulation and scenario is that we brought in things like ethics and accountability

26:56and reputation and care for their staff and things. So it quickly moves on from an active shooter environment to actually being about them asking themselves some really challenging questions over, did we make this happen? Is there something that we did? Is there something we missed? What could we have done differently? What do we tell our people? What is our next step? So that was a

27:27really challenging scenario to bring together for that. And I think with any of our scenarios, hopefully people who are listening will still want to do them, but they will find triggers. And as you well know, when you're under stress, that's when your true behaviours come out. And people might shut down, people might overcompensate, people might do all sorts of things. And so we want it to be a really

28:00safe and controlled environment. And so we take that into account. Now, when you're designing an active shooter scenario, and you're thinking about being in a controlled and safe and psychologically safe environment, that's a challenge. So we're constantly thinking about those things. Got it. So many deep questions come out of something that might feel like ordinary or that you've seen on the news, but it's like you never get to think beyond that. And you get in a position that you

28:34make those questions come up. I think it's really interesting. So Scott, this is my last question for you. What advice would you give a younger version of yourself starting out in this field?

28:49Become an AI designer.

28:54Invest in AI. Be curious. So yeah, be curious. And I think the beauty of being in a simulation or a scenario type environment, with the tools that you have through Conductor, for example, challenge, keep challenging yourself. Like, at the heart, absolutely make it simple. You don't want people to have, you don't want it to be so complex that people can't get through.

29:27Right. But if you are curious and you're leaving open ended questions,

29:35then it'll help the flow of a scenario. And so I think to my younger self, I would probably say

29:44become as much of a generalist in some specific areas as possible. I think I've got a good background in emergency management with natural disasters. I've been at active shooter situations. I've been involved in cyber attacks. I've been involved in brand and reputation. And I'm pretty lucky in having had that over the 20 years of my career. But for somebody who's maybe new to designing simulations and scenarios, study those things.

30:21Go and have a look at what's happened at different

30:25situations and take out of them. Well, what happened then? And then what happened? Be curious and ask those questions of that real life event and then bring that back into your design. So watch some really cool action movies and the great thing about Netflix and all those types of things is that action movies, you can learn off them and how they design the flow of the movie and the storytelling.

30:59So be curious. Learn as much as you can about the different types of areas that interest you.

31:10Learn how to become a storyteller. And if you can't become that storyteller, learn what others do and what is really important to how they tell that story. If you can do that, you'll become really strong in designing scenarios. Fantastic. Well, Scott, thank you very much for coming to the show. It's been a pleasure to have you here to learn about Nexus. I encourage everyone who is listening to

31:44Google it and find out more about what you're doing with the War Room because it's amazing. And we will be following what you're going to do next. So thank you very much for being in the show, Scott. Hey, thanks very much for having me. I really appreciate it. And yep, you can find me on LinkedIn and either scott at nexus.co.nz. Nexus N-X-U-S. Nexus is being at the center of something. And so, hence the name Nexus. You're at the center of a crisis.

32:16Hey, really appreciate the opportunity and happy designing everybody. Thank you, Scott. Bye. Thank you, Scott. Bye.