Measurement follows the communication channel

A company with forty employees rehearses an emergency in its meeting room. Day-to-day coordination runs on personal mobile phones and a messaging group; there is no PBX, no central telephone system with extensions. For the upcoming staff exercise, a proposal suggests building telephone infrastructure solely for measurement. This fictional example puts the planning question first: should the exercise serve a measurement purpose the existing channel cannot deliver?

In my manuscript “Prototype-Based Evaluation of Communication Dynamics in Simulated Crisis Exercises (Germany): A DSR Approach” – revised version of 12 May 2026, submitted to the Journal for East European Management Studies and not yet published – I developed and tested a prototype for capturing exercise communication. The title refers to evaluating communication dynamics in simulated crisis exercises by means of a prototype; DSR stands for Design Science Research, the development and testing of an artifact. For small and medium-sized enterprises I take from this work – explicitly as a transferability consideration, not an empirically tested rollout – that the measurement layer, the added technology or log keeping that captures communication data, should be inexpensive, easy to remove again, and compatible with existing communication habits; in a given case that may mean mobile messaging rather than internet-based telephone extensions. What matters is which time and address information the channel actually provides.

My recommendation follows from this: before any measurement planning, establish the channels crisis communication would actually run through. If a channel provides timestamps and contact persons – a messaging group with named roles, for instance – simple log keeping is enough. If it does not, there are two honest answers: deliberately limit capture to what the channel still provides and name that gap in the report, or further develop the communication channel itself as part of preparedness. A telephone route installed only for measurement, which would not exist in a real crisis, changes the exercise instead of making it representable.

The working approach starts with a short inventory: which channels are in use, which data they provide, which gap is accepted.