Brief exercise observers together and give them a shared guide

Suppose two groups observe the teams during a crisis exercise. One group logs decisions with times and addressees; the other mostly records impressions of how the teams worked together. The evaluation report compares teams on these records. When findings diverge between teams, it stays unclear whether the teams differed or the observers' recording routines did.

The object is the basis of observation: who observes whom, under which instructions notes are taken, and how records from different observers remain comparable. Exercise design settles this basis before the first run begins.

My conference manuscript “The Decision Corridor: An Exploratory Rubric for Reviewing Temporal Actionability in Crisis Management Team Decisions” (Rico Kerstan, version of 29 May 2026) describes such an arrangement: the red-team roles lay with the counter staff groups through which the scenario's events and messages reached the teams; these groups worked in pairs. A common briefing, a common coding manual (rules for assigning observations to categories), a shared situation description and one scripted inject plan, the schedule of these events and messages, underpinned their work. The manuscript documents this arrangement as part of the exercise setup; it does not test how much it contributes to comparability.

The extract does not describe how observers were staffed; the pairing and shared instructions are therefore my own design proposal for observation. All observers receive the same briefing and a shared guide naming the fields to record: time, observed decision, addressee and recognizable reason. Observers work in pairs, so that a record can be supplemented by a second view where needed.

The evaluation treats remaining observer differences as findings in their own right. Before any interpretation, it clarifies whether a difference between teams could also stem from the observation itself. This preserves what the comparison can support without assuming observers capture everything.

Before the next crisis exercise, exercise control should prepare the observer briefing together with the guide and align both with the inject plan. A short trial record before the first run shows early whether the instructions are understood.