Skip to content
Academy
Marketing Academy · Field Work●Brand Strategy
All projects·From: Brand Crisis Management
MiniSimulation· 25 minutes

Crisis War Room: The First Four Hours

Coinbase

Objective: Navigate a branching crisis-response simulation from detection through recovery, and see how one slow or defensive choice routes you into a genuinely worse position than the choice next to it.

You are the on-call comms lead at Coinbase. A viral video alleges customer trading funds were frozen without warning during a routine maintenance window, and mentions are spiking.

Make one decision per stage. Each option carries a real verdict, optimal, acceptable, or costly, and a costly choice can route you into a harder stage, not just a worse outcome at the end.

Before you start

What you'll need

Free path (everything below is enough to finish)

Google Sheets
FreeLog the stage, the option chosen, its verdict, and why, as a time-stamped decision record.

Free, no account friction, and mirrors the incident log a real crisis team keeps.

Google Docs(optional)
FreeDraft the actual holding statement text before comparing it to the simulation's Draft A/B/C options.

Free and lets you practice writing the acknowledge-act-commit-time structure from scratch.

The process

Simulation

Detect

T+0 to 15 minutes

Your social listening tool fires an alert: brand mentions are up 40x in 20 minutes. A support agent flags three near-identical complaints in the last hour, all claiming frozen funds.

Sample output
MENTION VOLUME: 40x baseline, rising
SENTIMENT: 78% negative
TOP POST: 340K views, 2 hours old, unverified claim
SUPPORT TICKETS (last hour): 3 matching complaints
Spend to date:$0
Budget remaining:Full crisis budget untouched

What do you do in the first 15 minutes?

Final deliverable

A time-stamped crisis decision log covering all five stages, each row showing the option you chose, its verdict, and a one-line justification tied to the lesson's framework.

See a reference example
Sample output
ThredUp crisis decision log (excerpt)

T+0-15min | DETECT | Chose: escalate-fast | Verdict: optimal
  Why: Escalated to crisis lead within 12 min instead of waiting for more tickets to confirm the pattern.

T+15-60min | ASSESS | Chose: score-level4-single-spokesperson | Verdict: optimal
  Why: Media interest plus 6,000 affected accounts cleared the Level 4 bar; named one spokesperson to avoid mixed messaging.

Success criteria

You're done when you can:

  • Completes all five stages with a decision logged for each
  • Correctly identifies which stage a costly choice routes into (assess-behind) and why it's harder than the direct path
  • Final log explains the reasoning for each choice, not just the verdict label