Command Under Pressure: What the First Ten Minutes of a Crisis Actually Demand

In more than 30 years in the Metropolitan Police — including as Chief Superintendent in charge of Public Order and Major Events — Colin Morgan commanded incidents where the quality of command in the first ten minutes determined everything that followed. The lessons from those incidents are not complicated. But they are consistently absent from the way most organisations train their commanders.

The Problem With How Most Organisations Approach Command

Most organisations promote capable people into command roles and provide them with little or no structured training for the specific demands of commanding. They understand their operational environment. They know the plans. What they have not practised is the cognitive and behavioural discipline that effective command requires when information is incomplete, time is short, and the consequences of a wrong decision are significant.

Generic leadership development programmes do not address this gap. Command is a specific skill set — and like all skills, it degrades without deliberate practice under realistic conditions.

What the First Ten Minutes Actually Demand

The first ten minutes of a serious incident are not the time to discover the limits of your command capability. The most immediate demands on a commander are not tactical — they are cognitive. Establishing a clear situational picture from fragmentary information. Making a decision on the basis of that picture, knowing it is incomplete. Communicating that decision clearly across the command structure. Maintaining strategic intent while managing immediate operational pressure.

These are trainable skills. But they require training that reflects the conditions under which they will be needed — not a classroom exercise where the answers are known in advance.

The Role of Interoperability

Major incidents almost always involve multiple agencies: police, fire, ambulance, transport operators, local authorities and others. The ability of Gold, Silver and Bronze commanders from different organisations to work together effectively — sharing a common operating picture, coordinating decisions, and maintaining command coherence — is critical. If commanders have never trained alongside the agencies they will need to work with, the first time they do so cannot be a real incident.

Building interoperability requires joint training and exercising. It cannot be achieved through policy documents or memoranda of understanding alone.

What Effective Command Training Looks Like

Command training that builds real capability places commanders in realistic, pressure-tested situations — not sanitised scenarios where the right answer is obvious. It uses structured debrief to surface specific learning from each exercise, embedding improvement rather than just cataloguing what happened. And it is built around the actual operating environment of the organisation, using scenarios drawn from the incidents and pressures commanders are most likely to face.

This is the approach Colin Morgan Consulting takes with every programme. The standard of command that results is not theoretical. It has been developed by someone who has commanded at the highest levels — and who knows what that actually requires.

If you would like to discuss command training for your organisation, please get in touch.