They know which entrance emergency services normally use. They know who needs to be contacted. They know which systems cause problems and which procedures work slightly differently in practice. 

That experience is useful. 

But what happens when that person is not there? 

Does the knowledge belong to the person or the organisation? 

Emergency plans are supposed to make a response repeatable and familiar. 

The problem is that some of the most important knowledge is often informal. 

It lives with experienced staff. 

That may work during normal operations, but an emergency can happen during a night shift, weekend, holiday or staff absence. 

The rest of the team still needs to respond. 

What happens when someone else has to take over? 

A tabletop exercise can test this very quickly. 

Who knows who has authority to make the decisions? 

Who contacts external responders? 

Who understands the access arrangements? 

Who knows which resources are available? 

Who takes over if the normal lead is unavailable? 

If only one person can answer those questions, the organisation has found a weakness worth addressing. 

Are handovers actually working? 

People change roles. 

Staff leave. 

New people join. 

Procedures change. 

Sites change. 

If important emergency knowledge is only passed through conversations and experience, some of it will eventually disappear. 

Exercises can expose what has been properly transferred and what still depends on individual knowledge. 

Can someone else lead the response? 

One way to test this is simple. 

Do not always give the same experienced person the same role. 

Let deputies lead. 

Bring different departments into the exercise. 

Change who is responsible for key decisions. 

The purpose is not to catch anyone out. 

It is to see whether the organisation can still operate when the usual person is unavailable. 

Where does STRX Tabletop fit? 

STRX Tabletop gives teams a structured system to work through these situations. 

Facilitators can introduce injects, move through defined phases, capture decisions and record where uncertainty appears. 

This makes it easier to see which responsibilities are understood across the team and which still depend on individual experience. 

The technology does not replace experienced people. 

It helps organisations build systems to test whether that experience has become shared knowledge. 

The real question 

A resilient emergency response should still work during staff changes, holidays, night shifts and unexpected absences. 

Experienced people will always matter. 

But they should not become a single point of failure. 

So the question is simple: 

If the person who normally knows what to do was not there, would everyone else still know what happens next? 

Try STRX Tabletop: 

 https://structurus.com/en/strx-tabletop 

For more information, email info@structurus.com.