Seminars/Drills/Games

Discussion Based Exercises

Seminars are generally employed to orient participants to, or provide an overview of, authorities, strategies, plans, policies, procedures, protocols, response resources, or concepts and ideas. Seminars provide a good starting point for jurisdictions that are developing or making major changes to their plans and procedures. They offer the following attributes:

Low-stress environment employing a number of instruction techniques such as lectures, multimedia presentations, panel discussions, case study discussions, expert testimony, and decision support tools

Workshops represent the second tier of exercises in the HSEEP building block approach. Although similar to seminars, workshops differ in two important aspects: participant interaction is increased, and the focus is on achieving or building a product (such as a plan or a policy). Workshops provide an ideal forum for:

In conjunction with exercise development, workshops are most useful in achieving specific aspects of exercise design such as:

A workshop may be used to produce new standard/emergency operating procedures (SOPs/EOPs), mutual aid agreements, Multiyear Exercise Plans, and Improvement Plans (IPs). To be effective, workshops must be highly focused on a specific issue and the desired outcome or goal must be clearly defined.

Drills are coordinated, supervised activities usually employed to test a single specific operation or function in a single agency. Drills are commonly used to provide training on new equipment, develop or test new policies or procedures, or practice and maintain current skills. Typical attributes include:

Games are a simulation of operations that often involves two or more teams, usually in a competitive environment, using rules, data, and procedures designed to depict an actual or assumed real-life situation. It does not involve the use of actual resources, and the sequence of events affects, and is in turn affected by, the decisions made by the players.

Players are commonly presented with scenarios and asked to perform a task associated with the scenario episode. As each episode moves to the next level of detail or complexity, it takes into account players' earlier decisions; thus, the decisions made by participants determine the flow of the game. The goal is to explore decision-making processes and the consequences of those decisions. In a game, the same situation can be examined from various perspectives by changing the variables and parameters that guide player actions. Large-scale games can be multi-jurisdictional and include active participation from Federal, State, and local governments. Games stress the importance of planners' and players' understanding and comprehension of interrelated processes.

With the evolving complexity and sophistication of current simulations, opportunities to provide enhanced realism for game participants have increased. Computer-generated scenarios and simulations can provide a more realistic and time-sensitive method of introducing situations for analysis. Planner decisions can be input and models run to show the effect of decisions made during a game. Distributed games (available via the Internet) offer many additional benefits, such as saving participants' time and travel expenses, offering more frequent training opportunities, and taking less time away from primary functions. They also provide a collaborative environment that reflects realistic occurrences. Games are excellent vehicles for the following:

DHS/ODP conducts ongoing analysis of commercial- and government-sector models, games, and simulations to identify those of value for exercise use. Although models, games, and simulations are not a substitute for full-scale exercises (FSEs), they are an increasingly more sophisticated and useful component of exercise programs. DHS/ODP has issued a list of government and commercially developed models, games, and simulations that have been evaluated.