Crisis simulation for executive teams
Break Glass
A live crisis simulation for leadership teams and boards.
A tabletop exercise tests the plan. Break Glass tests the room.
- Who
- Senior technical leaders, executive teams & boards
- Format
- Half or full day, in-house
- On the day
- Tailored scenario, live injects
- You keep
- Structured debrief & written report
When the plan meets reality
Plans are calm. Incidents are not.
Who this is for
Organisations where a technology, AI, cyber or supplier incident could quickly become a customer, regulatory, operational or reputational crisis.
What counts as a crisis
Not every incident is one. It becomes a crisis when it outruns the team handling it — the facts are still moving, the decisions belong to leadership, and the damage lands on customers, regulators and your name.
Crises fail between levels
The engineer who saw it first, the manager who sat on it, the exec who heard it last. The gap is never technical.
The case for doing this
The obligation
Annual
Already mandatory if you're APRA-regulated
CPS 230 requires an annual business continuity exercise across all critical operations, tested against severe but plausible scenarios. The extension non-SFIs held on business continuity and scenario analysis ended 1 July 2026.
APRA Prudential Standard CPS 230
The waste
70.6%
The spend is committed. The value is not.
Australian organisations told the Business Continuity Institute the timeframe was short enough that the requirement would be met as a tick-box. But the standard asks you to prove you can hold tolerance levels under severe but plausible scenarios, and a disengaged room cannot answer that. Same budget, same day out of the diary. Very different returns.
BCI Operational Resilience Report 2024
The saving
US$1.33M
The cost of hesitating under pressure
Breaches contained in under 200 days cost an average of $1.33M less than those that outrun the team. Testing decision-making beforehand is what prevents containment delays when the facts are moving.
IBM, Cost of a Data Breach 2026
The gap
62%
Hit by a deepfake attack in 12 months
While 61% of executives say their organisation has no protocol for deepfake risk at all. The attack has already arrived. The response has not been written.
Gartner, September 2025 (302 security leaders)
How the day runs
01
Design
Built for you, not off a shelf
We write the scenario before the day, around your industry and your risk surface, sitting deliberately adjacent to your exact systems. The room practises the skills, not the plan it already wrote.
02
Simulate
Then it starts
Timed injects on a clock that does not pause while your team argues. No scripts, no observers, no invented personas — you play your own role, and everyone is in the incident.
03
Debrief
Before anyone leaves the room
We replay what the room actually did while it is still fresh, and your team writes its own risk register to take away. Our written report follows.
Scenarios we run
Deepfake CFO fraud
A video call approves a transfer that never happened.
Rogue customer-facing AI
Your support bot starts promising refunds nobody authorised.
Shadow-AI data leak
The customer list went into a public model. Months ago.
AI failure, live in the press
A journalist has your model output and a deadline.
Data breach
Records are out. Nobody can tell you yet how many, or since when.
…or the one that keeps you up at night.
What you keep
- A risk register your own team writes, on the day
- Our written report afterwards
- Details of where escalation stalled, and who was waiting on whom
- Actions with owners against them
- A documented view of how your team decides when the facts keep changing
Why Kaleida
Crisis consultancies audit your response process. We develop the people running it, too.
Break Glass is built by people who have run technical organisations, not by facilitators working from a generic script.
Technical credibility
We know how engineering, product and AI systems actually work, and how they fail. That is what makes a scenario credible enough for a technical room to take it seriously.
Leadership development
Developing technical leaders is our day job, from first-time engineering managers to the senior bench. We are not a crisis vendor that also runs training.
Practical facilitation
We build the day to be worth the diary time: engaging enough that people commit to it, and useful enough that they leave with decisions rather than notes.
Technical leadership programs delivered at
Ways to start
Scoping conversation
Free
45 minutes on your risk surface and who needs to be in the room.
Book a scoping callFounding client 2026
Break Glass — half or full day
Let's talk
Tailored scenario, live facilitation, debrief and written report. Reduced pricing for a named case study.
Start the conversationStanding drill program
Let's talk
Quarterly simulations with escalating scenarios across your leadership bench.
Talk to usCommon questions
How is this different from a cyber tabletop exercise?
A tabletop walks through the incident response plan and checks whether the steps are right. Break Glass runs the room as well: who decides, who freezes, where escalation breaks, and what the team does when the facts are incomplete and contradictory. Cyber firms test the plan. We test the leaders, too.
Do we need a crisis plan before we do this?
No. If you have one, we stress-test it. If you do not, the simulation surfaces what a plan would need to cover — usually more usefully than starting from a template.
How long does it take, and who needs to be there?
Half or full day, delivered in-house. The value depends on the real decision-makers being in the room — the exec team, senior leadership and where relevant the board or risk committee. Sending delegates tests the wrong people.
How technical does it get?
The scenarios are technically credible — we work with technical organisations and can run AI failure modes believably. But the exercise is about decision-making under pressure, not about incident forensics. Nobody needs to read a log file.
What do we get afterwards?
A structured debrief on the day, plus a written report: how the team behaved under pressure, where escalation held and where it snapped, and a prioritised set of fixes with owners and dates.
Can you run our scenario rather than one of yours?
Yes. Scenarios are tailored to your risk surface — the one that keeps you up at night is usually the right one to run.
We're not a tech company; can we Break Glass with Kaleida?
Yes, the Break Glass experience is for any organisation! Whether you have embedded AI or just scratched the surface, the benefit of knowing your strengths and opportunities for a crisis is immense.
When did your team last break glass?
Book a 45-minute scoping conversation: your risk surface, and who needs to be in the room. No cost, no obligation.
Or email hello@teamkaleida.com