How playing D&D at work can improve your incident response?

The speaker describes a company that redesigned its incident response procedures and then needed a way to train staff and check whether the written processes actually worked. Classroom sessions, videos and technical labs each trade off usefulness against reuse, so the team turned to tabletop exercises: in-person, role-based games where players respond to injected information and practise communication and decisions rather than technical fixes.

Building the first game took several weeks of mapping possible player actions into a decision tree, with a game master controlling time and the flow of information. Players could only act on information formally passed between teams, business operations continued as normal, and the scenarios were deliberately hard to win. Across 13 sessions in five locations with more than 160 participants, recurring problems included unclear moments to declare an incident, miscommunication between teams, reluctance to involve legal or communications, and engineers who focused on patching rather than reporting.

Teams that had played before communicated better and felt more prepared than first-time players, although all groups rated their own performance similarly. The speaker's practical advice was to keep scenarios few and well built, plan mechanics that speed up and slow down game time, keep the environment fictional enough to control, playtest with different groups, and enforce turn-taking. The main takeaway is that clear communication matters more than knowing every technical detail.