EMII Breakfast Briefing: From Exercise to Excellence: Building Emergency Management Capability

From Exercise to Excellence: Building Emergency Management Capability

EMII Breakfast Briefing

6 November 2026

We do not exercise merely to demonstrate that we are prepared; we exercise to discover how we can be better prepared.

Our Breakfast Briefing “From Exercise to Excellence: Building Emergency Management Capability” will explore how organisations can transform emergency management exercises from routine compliance activities into powerful opportunities for organisational learning, training operationalisation, continuous improvement, and crisis leadership competence.

Delivered by EMII Members Dr Pat Leahy, Eileen Tully and John Brophy, who between them have more than forty years’ experience in this area, this briefing is for members looking to build, refresh, or refine their skills in planning, managing, and evaluating emergency exercises.

The presenters will examine the critical role of designing realistic, structured, and progressively challenging exercise scenarios in testing emergency plans, strengthening decision-making, validating training and procedures, and enhancing collaboration across teams, agencies, and stakeholders.

Emergency exercises alone do not build capability, rather it is the pre exercise preparation, the evaluation, debriefing, learning, adaptation, and sustained, documented improvement that creates genuine organisational resilience. With this in mind the briefing will explore;

• Setting clear exercise objectives and tailoring scenarios to organisational needs
• Identifying capability gaps and capturing meaningful lessons
• Translating findings into corrective actions
• Measuring progress in an organisation’s emergency preparedness

Through practical insights, case studies and a capability-focused approach, the presenters will set out the journey from exercise to excellence, creating an emergency management culture where preparedness is embedded, lessons translate into action, and individuals and organisations are equipped to perform effectively when it matters most.

Presenters

Dr Pat Leahy is a member of the Industry Advisory Board for the Dublin City University Business School, Deputy Chairperson of the Emergency Management Institute of Ireland (EMII) and is co-founder and director of One Team-Risk Management Solutions Limited. He works with Government Departments and key industries (Critical Entities) focussing on Strategic Risk Management and Crisis Readiness; the development and delivery of organisational Crisis Management Plans; ‘Critical Incident and Crisis Management’ Training, Testing, and Exercising, and Business Continuity Management.

Mr John Brophy is an emergency and crisis management practitioner with experience and expertise in the crisis, emergency and business continuity disciplines. As co-founder of Reidy Brophy Ltd., he specialises in the design, facilitation and evaluation of training exercises and workshops. He has designed and facilitated multi-agency exercises at EU level and at the national level for the National Emergency Coordination Group, as well as for individual organisations seeking to validate their training and test their contingency plans.

Ms Eileen Tully recently retired as Head of Emergency Management in the Department of Transport. In that role she established the Department’s Emergency Planning function and led the delivery of two National Emergency Coordination Group (NECG) exercises with the Department of Transport in the chair.  Eileen is currently a key member of the Office of Emergency Management NRA Working Group engaged in preparing the 2026 National Risk Assessment and has recently returned to teach on the DCU MSc in Emergency Management.