I went to CLAW for the first time in Barcelona in 2025. I had an idea of what to expect, but I don’t think I really understood what crisis training could look like until I was there.
CLAW is one of those events that is quite difficult to explain by simply calling it “crisis management training”, because that makes it sound much more limited than it actually is.
There are plenty of crisis-management courses aimed at management, security professionals or people who already have crisis response as part of their job. CLAW brings together people from across the NREN community, from different organisations, different professional backgrounds and with very different levels of crisis-management experience.
I think that is exactly where much of its value lies.
The first day of CLAW 2025 was mostly about learning. We started with lessons from the Iberian Peninsula’s power outage and then moved into workshops on decision-making, team dynamics and information flow during a crisis. By the third workshop my brain was pretty ‘fried’… But somewhere between all that learning, we also got to interact with people we hadn’t met before, which turned out to be quite useful the next day when we suddenly had to work together.
And then we had a crisis
For the simulation we were split into five teams: NOC, CSIRT, PR, Management and Social Media.
Then things started happening.
Information coming in from different places, rumours, questions, new developments and decisions that needed to be made without necessarily having all the information you would like to have first. At the same time, the other teams were dealing with their own part of the same crisis.
For me, this was where a lot of things clicked.
When a real crisis happens, it rarely stays neatly within the group of people who have “crisis management” somewhere in their job description.
Suddenly someone needs to make a decision. Someone needs to understand what is actually happening. Someone needs to communicate internally or externally. Technical teams need information from management, management needs information from technical teams, and everyone needs to work out what is confirmed, what is assumed, what is urgent and what can wait.
You can very quickly find yourself much closer to the crisis than you expected.
And once the simulation starts, you also realise how much depends on people actually being able to work together. Who knows what? Who needs to know it? Has anybody told them? Is this confirmed or are we all suddenly reacting to a rumour?
You can have procedures and plans, but crisis preparedness is not only about having the right procedure in a folder somewhere. It is also about people being able to function together when information is incomplete, time is short and the situation keeps changing.
You discover how easily information gets lost or distorted, how difficult apparently simple decisions can become under pressure and how much trust, communication and understanding between teams matter.
And you get to discover all of that in a simulation, where getting something wrong becomes a lesson rather than an actual disaster.
You don’t need to be a “crisis person”
This is probably the biggest insight I took home from CLAW 2025.
You don’t need to be a crisis-management expert to take part, and you certainly don’t need to be senior management. There is room to learn the fundamentals and to develop existing skills, with workshops aimed at different levels of experience. Then everyone ends up in the exercise together.
That mix matters.
You might work in networking, security, communications, management, operations or something else entirely. Most of us will hopefully never find ourselves in the middle of a major crisis at work.
But we don’t necessarily get to decide that.
One day, circumstances may put you in the middle of a crisis response anyway. You might be the person who has information somebody desperately needs, the person who needs to communicate something, or simply the person who has to make a decision without having the complete picture.
CLAW gives you a chance to experience some of that before it is real.
And if one day you do end up there, it is probably quite useful if it isn’t your first time.
CLAW returns in 2026. Click here to find out more.
