A facilitated team simulation of a zoonotic outbreak. Four teams each hold one sector, and because every team is given only its own sector's information, none of them can contain the outbreak without the other three.
When no sector can see the whole picture or act alone, what does it take to work as one, and what gets in the way?
The session is about multisector collaboration under pressure: where it creates opportunities, where it generates friction, and what it costs to hold together. The outbreak is the setting in which participants meet those problems. The scenario itself is not the subject being taught.
Each team works from its own screen, and the facilitator projects the board that the whole room can see.
A team is shown its own signals, its own resources and the decisions open to it. It is not shown the other three screens, so anything the rest of the room has established has to reach it some other way.
The room opens with scattered signals arriving from four directions and no diagnosis. Working out what is actually happening is the first task, and the design does not allow it to be skipped.
In each round the four teams investigate, decide and commit resources. The facilitator then resolves the round, and the room sees what its combined decisions did to the outbreak.
The outbreak, public trust and the economy belong to the whole room, and no team has a score of its own. A shortcut taken by one sector produces a problem the other three have to manage.
Four constraints require participants to exercise judgement rather than work through a list of available options.
A control measure taken before the source is understood delivers a fraction of its effect. Spending more does not compensate for having skipped the investigation, so the room has to establish what it is dealing with before its response counts for much.
The outbreak, public trust and the economy each carry their own measure. Containment achieved through coercion registers as lost trust and lost income, and low trust then reduces compliance with every measure that follows.
Each sector holds one budget for the whole outbreak, a small number of field teams that reset each round, and a share of a single national laboratory. Money spent early is money unavailable at the peak.
Each sector faces one forced decision per round in which both courses of action carry a real cost. Declining to decide carries a cost as well, so a team cannot avoid the trade-off by waiting it out.
What each team is reasoning about, round to round.
Deciding what to find out, in what order, and when the evidence is strong enough to justify acting on it. Some of the leads presented are sound and some are not, and the teams have to judge which is which.
Allocating a limited number of field teams each round, and competing with the other three sectors for laboratory confirmation that only one sector can have at a time.
Deciding not only whether to act but how hard and how widely, in situations where the proportionate response and the decisive one point in different directions.
Deciding what to share and when, and whether to commit scarce capacity to joint work that pays off only if the other sectors commit to it as well.
Pressure is not constant. It builds to a peak in the middle rounds, then eases.
The frameworks are named in the debrief, once participants have already made the decisions those frameworks describe.
The frameworks are built into how the simulation behaves, rather than presented as content to be read.
The design follows the prevention, preparedness and response functions, the distinction between spillover and spread, indicator-based and event-based surveillance, and the published economics of prevention compared with response.
The scenario's parameters, clinical course and control measures follow the published record of a real zoonotic outbreak. The pathogen is not named to participants until the debrief.
Participants play first. The frameworks are then named in the debrief against decisions they have already made and can remember making.
Participants are not given the opening signals, the investigations or control measures open to each sector, the dilemmas they will face, or how any of it resolves. They are asked not to look the scenario up, because the session depends on their meeting the outbreak without already knowing what it is.
Facilitator materials contain the full answer key, the resolution logic and the debrief script.
A run guide written to be used live, setting out what to do, what to say and what to watch for in each block, with per-round guidance, contingencies, a full debrief script and an answer key. A separate dry-run script is provided for rehearsal.
A brief covering how a round works, and one role card per sector, issued only to the team holding that sector. The brief has been checked to make sure it gives nothing away.
A concepts deck for facilitator grounding or participant pre-reading, a plain-language knowledge guide written to bridge from clinical and infectious disease practice, and a session deck for use in the room.
The sourced basis for the scenario's figures, clinical detail and control measures, with references, for facilitators who want to check the working.