The First Sixty Minutes: A Live Crisis Response Simulation
Objective: Navigate a branching, real-time crisis unfolding over the first two hours after detection, making the same pause/post/platform/DM-routing decisions the lesson's playbook describes, and see the consequence of each choice play out.
You're the on-call social media manager at Zillow when a home-value estimate error on a high-traffic listing starts trending on X on a Friday night.
Work through 3 live decision points, from detection to the 2-4 hour narrative window, choosing the optimal response at each stage.
Before you start
What you'll need
Free path (everything below is enough to finish)
Free, catches the moment the thread jumps to news or blog coverage
Paid upgrades (optional, faster/deeper)
Confirms in real time whether the thread has jumped from X onto Reddit or elsewhere, the spread signal the playbook depends on
The process
Simulation
Minute 10, detection
10 minutes after first spikeA user posts a screenshot claiming Zillow's Zestimate valued their home $400,000 below its actual sale price, and it's picked up 300 replies in 10 minutes. Your scheduled weekend promo post is queued to go live in 20 minutes.
X mentions: 300 replies in 10 min, climbing | Scheduled posts queued: 1 (promo, 2 platforms) | On-call staff reachable: you only, manager off-grid until tomorrow AM
What's your first move?
Final deliverable
A completed run through all 3 decision points with the optimal choice at each stage, plus a one-paragraph after-action note on what would have gone wrong at each 'costly' branch.
See a reference example
Care.com after-action note, listing-verification incident Paused the scheduled newsletter send within 8 minutes of detection. Posted a holding acknowledgement at minute 22, before the 30-minute window closed, without naming a root cause. Closed the thread at hour 2 with one substantive update, corrected a single factual error with a source, and routed 14 individual account questions to the support DM queue instead of answering them in the replies.
Success criteria
You're done when you can:
- Selects the optimal option at all 3 stages
- Can explain in one sentence why each costly branch would have made the outcome worse
- Final close-out separates the public correction from the private, account-specific responses