Scenario Development

Much of my work in recent years has involved creating complex scenarios to help learners navigate complicated situations that they may face in the real world. Here are a few examples: 

Terrorism and All-Hazards Preparation and Prevention for Law Enforcement (TAPP-LE) 

The TAPP-LE scenario home page

A project sponsored by the Center for Rural Development (CRD), TAPP-LE sought to train police officers to detect and prevent potentially significant threats to their community.

In 2011, I developed a scenario for this project that was based on a complicated story of two rival gangs that were fighting over the illicit drug trade in a fictional city.

To succeed in the scenario, learners had to connect to valuable resources, share information, and use faint signals to recognize the escalating gang war. The scenario design featured multiple nodes, extensive branching paths, and multiple paths to success or failure.

Link to course

Af-Pak Scenario

In 2007, Teleologic was tasked by the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) with creating a realistic scenario to prepare U.S. military officers for the challenges they might face when they deployed to Afghanistan.

The scenario I designed and wrote included a variety of significant problems that challenged the learners' cultural adaptiveness and political savvy as they prepared to operate in the difficult Af-Pak region. The scenario featured branching paths that gave the learners an opportunity to see the positive or adverse results of their decisions.

When the course was finished, the client called it "a well done site that as we already knew far exceeds anything else out there!"

Link to course

U.S. Army North Disaster Scenarios

The scenario was customized for each category of learner. 

To prepare for its fighting missions, the military trains endlessly in realistic environments. But for a disaster-support mission, where the military serves a support role for civilian agencies, opportunities are rare to bring together all the local, state, and federal civilian agencies involved in disaster response.

To prepare for potential disaster-response missions, U.S. Army North wanted something beyond the introductory Defense Support of Civil Authorities (DSCA) course. An intermediate level of training would provide a bridge between the introductory course and a full-fledged on-site exercise.

Teleologic developed three disaster-response scenarios based on three catastrophic incidents: a major hurricane, a major chemical leak, and a nuclear incident. At the start of the scenario exercise, learners selected their real-life role, and the situations they encountered in the scenario were customized for that role. Each scenario introduced different kinds of problems that are common to disaster response. Through the scenarios, military personnel could connect the process of disaster response described in planning documents with its practice in a realistic setting.