Developing a quality tabletop exercise takes weeks — sometimes months. Researching scenarios, writing situation manuals, building facilitator guides, creating evaluation forms, formatting presentations. For agencies with small teams (or a team of one), that timeline means fewer exercises per year and less time for everything else.
Beehive was built to compress that timeline. It generates complete, HSEEP-aligned exercise packages from your inputs — not generic templates, but materials tailored to your jurisdiction, hazards, and objectives. This guide walks through how to integrate Beehive into your exercise workflow, step by step.
What Beehive Delivers
Before getting into the workflow, here's what a Beehive exercise package includes:
Complete Exercise Package
- Situation Manual (SitMan) — The core exercise document with scenario narrative, injects, discussion questions, and participant instructions
- Facilitator Guide — Step-by-step instructions for running the exercise, including timing, talking points, and expected discussion areas
- Evaluation Forms — Assessment tools aligned to your stated objectives and core capabilities
- Presentation Deck — Professional slides for participant briefing, scenario delivery, and exercise wrap-up
Every deliverable is HSEEP-aligned, professionally formatted, and branded to your organization. These aren't rough drafts that need heavy rework — they're execution-ready materials that your team reviews, refines, and owns.
The Beehive Workflow
Define Your Exercise Parameters
Every Beehive exercise starts with your inputs. You provide the information that shapes the exercise:
- Scenario type — What's the threat or hazard? Hurricane, active threat, cyber incident, pandemic, hazmat release, or something specific to your jurisdiction
- Exercise objectives — What capabilities are you testing? What do you want participants to walk away understanding?
- Participating organizations — Who's at the table? This shapes the injects and discussion questions to be relevant to each player
- Local context — Your geography, critical infrastructure, population characteristics, and organizational structure
- Scope and complexity — A 2-hour tabletop for department heads looks different from a full-day multi-agency exercise
The more specific your inputs, the more tailored the output. But Beehive is designed to work with what you have — you don't need a 20-page brief to get started.
Beehive Generates Your Package
From your inputs, Beehive builds the complete exercise package. The AI engine handles the time-intensive work:
- Constructing a realistic scenario narrative that unfolds across multiple phases
- Writing injects that challenge participants and test your stated objectives
- Building discussion questions that drive meaningful conversation, not checkbox responses
- Aligning evaluation criteria to HSEEP core capabilities and your specific objectives
- Formatting everything into professional, branded documents
This is where the time savings happen. What traditionally takes weeks of writing, formatting, and cross-referencing is generated in hours.
Review and Refine
Beehive generates the materials. Your team owns them. This review step is where your expertise makes the exercise yours:
- Verify local accuracy — Are street names, facility references, and organizational details correct for your jurisdiction?
- Calibrate difficulty — Are the injects appropriately challenging for your participants' experience level?
- Add institutional knowledge — Layer in lessons learned from real incidents, local political considerations, or specific capability gaps you want to probe
- Adjust scope — Add, remove, or modify injects and discussion questions to match your available time and audience
The goal is to start from a solid, professional foundation rather than a blank page. Most teams spend a few hours refining rather than weeks building from scratch.
Execute the Exercise
With your finalized package, you have everything needed to run the exercise:
- The presentation deck walks participants through the scenario in a structured briefing
- The facilitator guide keeps discussion on track with timing cues, probing questions, and transition points
- The SitMan gives participants the reference material they need to engage meaningfully
- The evaluation forms capture observations against your stated objectives in real time
Because the materials are professionally formatted and internally consistent, participants engage with the scenario — not the formatting. And facilitators can focus on guiding discussion instead of managing logistics.
Document and Build Forward
After the exercise, the evaluation data and materials become part of your institutional record:
- Completed evaluation forms feed directly into after-action reporting
- Exercise materials document what was tested, how, and what was found — evidence for stakeholder briefings and grant documentation
- Lessons learned inform parameters for future Beehive exercises, making each one more targeted
Over time, you build a documented exercise history that outlasts any single director. The next person in the role inherits a program, not a blank slate.
What Stays Human
Beehive handles the time-intensive production work. But the parts of exercise development that matter most remain firmly in your hands:
- Strategic design — You decide what to exercise, why, and who should be at the table
- Facilitation — Running the room, reading the audience, and steering productive discussion requires human judgment
- Evaluation — Interpreting what happened and what it means for your organization's preparedness
- Relationships — Building the trust and buy-in that make exercises effective in the first place
The best exercise programs have always been about people, not documents. Beehive just makes sure the documents don't become the bottleneck.
Key Takeaways
- Beehive generates complete, HSEEP-aligned exercise packages from your inputs — SitMans, facilitator guides, eval forms, and presentations
- What takes weeks of manual development is generated in hours, then refined by your team
- The more specific your inputs (scenario, objectives, participants, local context), the more tailored the output
- Your expertise drives the strategy, facilitation, and evaluation — Beehive handles the production
- Each exercise builds your institutional record, making the next one stronger
Getting Started
The fastest way to see how Beehive fits your workflow is to start with a single exercise. Pick an upcoming tabletop — ideally one you'd develop anyway — and use Beehive to generate the materials. Compare the time investment and output quality to your traditional process.
Most teams find the difference is immediate: less time in document production, more time on the work that actually builds preparedness.