Protecting Employees Through Planning and Exercises for Active Shooter Incidents

Approach and Results

We launched this effort with a kickoff meeting with the company’s corporate security, human resources, facilities management, and communications leaders. Prior to the on-site kickoff meeting, we had conducted research into current industry and policing best practices, benchmarked four other companies in the same industry as our client, and met with local law enforcement leaders in the client’s headquarters location to gain local context.

As the discovery phase continued, we conducted interviews with our client’s leaders that had been involved in previous active shooter situations along with law enforcement in the impacted cities. We also reviewed the client’s internal after-action documentation and conducted a review of their current emergency procedures.

As we shifted into the ideation phase, we worked with the client’s project team to generate new ideas for their active shooter plan through facilitated ideation and planning sessions. As initial concepts came together, we iterated through weekly meetings with the client to finalize the new active shooter plans.

In parallel to the ideation and planning effort, we were working independently with local, state, and federal law enforcement to craft an active shooter exercise to be conducted at the client’s corporate headquarters over a weekend. The exercise was designed to be a fully simulated active shooter incident involving a simulated incident, a response by corporate security, and then a full-scale multi-agency law enforcement, fire, and EMS response.

After the plans and training were completed and implemented, we facilitated the exercise in conjunction with multiple law enforcement and public safety agencies. Following the successful exercise, we wrote a detailed after-action report that was used by the company and local law enforcement to drive additional enhancements to their processes.