Where the Plan Meets the People: A Cybersecurity TTX in Minnetonka

My first time in Minnesota was an accident.

My wife and I were flying back from Montana with a connection in Minneapolis that was canceled. In a hastily booked hotel near the Mall of America did we wait for 24 hours until we could get on the next plane to our home in Washington DC.

The second time, I accompanied my wife to a spring wedding in St. Paul featuring one of her college friends. The experience overall was wonderful even though we managed a spring snowstorm, which I would assume is not uncommon to Minnesota.

When I stepped out of Minneapolis-St. Paul airport in August 2026 it was into such humidity free fall air beneath such cloudless sky that it was a bit jarring. In DC, we had the opposite. We had unseasonable heat and humidity, so my early morning began with 98% humidity and Minneapolis felt like a dream.

I climbed into a rental car driven by Joe Goodwin who had himself arrived the same morning. We were destined for neighboring Minnetonka where we were to deliver a cybersecurity tabletop exercise in just a couple of hours. I put on my sunglasses as I could expect no shade from a passing cloud on the drive. Joe and I posted up at a nearby coffee shop where we caught up and discussed the upcoming exercise.

The scatterplot of my trips to Minnesota is highly disbursed:

·      Flight Cancellation

·      Wedding

·      Cybersecurity TTX

This was the first cybersecurity tabletop exercise offered to municipalities after a successful program to deliver cybersecurity tabletops to K12 school districts. Fractional Source designed, developed, and facilitated a customized cybersecurity TTX for an audience of 25 municipal leaders in partnership with Sourcewell. As all TTXs do, this one opened our eyes and presented opportunities for new resilience measures.

As with all of our TTXs, what we built for Minnetonka was customized based on some self-assessments from them and risk modeling by us…well, by Joe. We met the team at the Minnetonka fire station, which included a restored vintage firetruck in the lobby. I snapped a picture and sent it to my father, a former volunteer fireman.

Once inside, we met the leadership team from departments across city functions including

City manager’s office

Fire

Police

IT

Parks and Rec

Public Works

Legal

Community Development

Finance

Over the course of three hours, we worked through a scenario that tested not just the ability of IT to respond to incidents, but all leaders. Who were the stakeholders? Who had authority to escalate? Who calls the vendor? All questions that can become tripwires in real situations.

Every municipality and community is unique, but all can agree that the processes that underpin even the sharpest technical solutions can be a major weakness in a moment of crisis. All can similarly agree that a cybersecurity event is not something from which we can hide. If there’s one lesson we can learn from cybersecurity events old and new it is that high end technology alone does not inoculate the victim. Organizations can make themselves less attractive targets, but, as recent events confirm, not even the FBI is immune to attempts upon its systems.

Failing Safely

Cybersecurity events come with anxiety, pressure, and stress upon the humans involved and affected. For those charged with the execution and leadership of cybersecurity incident response, the first time they work through the plan should not be after they blow the dust off it after it is taken from the shelf. Everyone, not just the IT manager, should be familiar with the incident response plan and their specific role in it. If any organization has a hope of leveraging whatever technology it may have, they need to make sure the humans understand the plan and can execute it.

Wisdom tells us that we learn more from failures than successes, but most municipalities cannot afford for those failures to happen during a live event. This is what Fractional Source is solving. It’s true that you learn more in failure, so let’s build a safe environment where we can find the issues we need to fix and work together to close gaps. Tabletop exercises aren’t competitions and there aren’t formal winners. Winning means you identified a problem, a gap, or a miscommunication safely and not during a live incident.

This is what we did in Minnetonka with a cohesive group of strong municipal leaders and there are more on the schedule. When does your town have minimal humidity…because I’ll be there.