Recent crises and disasters, both natural and man-made have led to the conclusion that there is a need for a resilient approach to preparing for and dealing with such events is needed. In this context, the DARWIN project aims to improve response to expected and unexpected crises affecting critical infrastructures and social structures by developing management guidelines on resilience concepts and innovative training modules for crisis management. The guidelines will cover essential resilience abilities of stakeholders to anticipate, monitor, respond, adapt, learn and evolve, to ensure efficient operation in face of crises. This paper uses a selection of resilience concepts to illustrate how resilience management guidelines can be used to understand and improve crises management. The application of the concepts to this specific case is an experiment to guide further work. This experiment shows that resilience guidelines should enable discovery on how multiple actors operate in a flexible manner and adapt in rapidly changing environment. Further work, needs to specify a set of guidelines co-developed and tested with end-users.