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Organizational learning in crisis management is crucial for decision-makers, and especially for senior managers whose intuitive conception of crisis management is more structural and organizational than based on soft-skills, decision-making, or emotion-oriented perspectives. As a superior technique for mapping the entire decision-making process of managers, the cognitive map allows us to determine the optimal sequence of learning activities. Such maps can be used as reliable representations of knowledge acquisition. We mobilized various modes of face-to-face learning, using digital tools such as serious games. Through crisis-management learning sessions in an industrial multinational we demonstrate that it is not the levers themselves that lead to the real acquisition of knowledge but rather the sequence of successive learning actions. These conclusions enable organizations to better tailor practical management action and necessary learning investment to increase management teams’ skills in crisis management.