The time to practice Incident Response (IR) and execute organization Communications Plans is not in the middle of a cyber incident! The same goes for making decisions about who is the incident commander and their priorities – IR cannot be a pick-up basketball game! Organizations – government, military, commercial, academic, non-profits – can all benefit from developing basic plans and policies for IR and practicing them “left of boom” via exercises. Ideally, exercises should be hands on events that test the effectiveness of all phases of IR. However, these types of exercises can be very expensive and not hit the marks when it comes to including organization leadership. The alternative to consider are Tabletop Exercise (TTX) which can be tailored specifically to incorporate leaders at all levels working through the challenges of IR. Done right, TTXs can be low-cost, high-impact events that encourage internal collaboration prior to a cyber incident that is a crisis.