Decision Making Under Pressure
Cyber incidents don’t follow scripts, and neither should your training.
This interactive workshop puts participants inside a live, high-pressure incident where they must make decisions together with limited information and time pressure. Every choice changes the outcome in real time, exposing how teams think, communicate, and respond under stress.
Participants will explore decision-making, communication, and risk trade-offs through a realistic, facilitated scenario, then leave with practical insights they can apply immediately in their own organisations.
Traditional cyber training focuses on knowledge. Real incidents test judgement.
This workshop uses a web-based tabletop exercise to simulate a live cyber incident, such as ransomware, data breach, or insider threat. Participants work as a team, making decisions under time pressure while the scenario evolves based on their choices.
The session is designed to surface real behaviours, not theoretical answers. Teams will vote on actions, rate their confidence, and see immediate consequences across key areas such as operational impact, public trust, and threat containment.
Key learning outcomes include:
- Understanding how decisions are made under pressure
- Recognising gaps between plans and real-world behaviour
- Improving communication across technical and non-technical roles
- Building confidence in handling ambiguity and incomplete information
The workshop is accessible to both technical and non-technical participants. No prior incident response experience is required.
This is not gamified training. It is a realistic, facilitated experience designed to reflect the complexity and pressure of real incidents.
Jemma Davis is the co-founder of DECID:R and author of Access Denied. She has led post-incident recovery, rebuilt security functions from scratch, and delivered cyber awareness programmes at scale across government, healthcare, and global organisations. Her work sits between strategy and operations, focusing on the human behaviours that frameworks alone cannot fix.
Lucy Smith is the co-founder of DECID:R and Inclusive Change. She has lived experience of neurodiversity and has been working in the area of neurodiversity for 6 years. Lucy combines a career in change management in internationally renowned organisations with experience in education to create thoughtful and inspiring training and consultancy services.