Purpose – Supporting and communicating with citizens is a vital part of societal crisis management.Training exercises may offer an opportunity to develop capabilities among managers in this regard.The purpose of this paper is to examine this potential in an analysis of how citizens were portrayed andperceived by participants in a major crisis management exercise.

Design/methodology/approach – Observation, document analysis and short interviews during theexercise were used as data collection methods. Data were subjected to thematic analysis to capture corethemes in relation to the research aim.

Findings – Patterns in how citizens’ reactions were portrayed in the exercise were identified to form acitizen behaviour typology. Observations during the exercise also demonstrated some of the challenges inincorporating the citizen perspective. However, findings regarding the perception of the citizen perspectivealso demonstrate the ability of exercise participants to meet and respond to public behaviours with respectand seriousness.

Originality/value – Variation is an important condition for learning in exercises, and the identifiedtypology is suggested as a starting point for achieving this in incorporation of the citizen perspective intraining scenarios. The results of the study are discussed in terms of a learning framework with the aim ofexplicitly developing crisis managers’ ability to interact and communicate with citizens in crisis situations.