Work Ready · Module 2
The Halbrook Order
Forty items, ninety minutes of prep, and nobody can tell you what time the customer is coming. Work out what is actually going on before you decide what to do about it.
About 10 minutes. Nothing is marked right or wrong. What you find out changes what you are able to do next, so the order you do things in matters.
Module 1 gave the learner three separate decisions and scored each one. It worked, but the choices did not touch each other. You could answer question three without having thought about question one.
This module carries state. The evidence you gather changes which options exist later. How you speak to a colleague changes what he tells you, which changes what you can do. The panel on the right shows your own understanding of the situation and updates as it changes.
Turn these notes off with the button in the header to see it as a learner would.
Your school or college will have given you this. Leave it blank if you're just having a look. We don't ask for your name and we don't keep anything about you.
School code:
The situation
Saturday, 10:20
You are three weeks into a placement at Fenn & Co, a small bakery and café. You are on the morning shift with Dan, who is nineteen and has been here six months.
Your supervisor Priya left for the cash and carry at ten. She will not be back until half eleven and she does not pick up when she is driving.
The order book is open on the counter. There is a collection order for eleven o'clock. Forty sausage rolls, twenty cheese twists, name of Halbrook.
You have done enough prep shifts to know that forty and twenty is about ninety minutes of work.
It is twenty past ten. Nothing has been started.
The pressure is arithmetic, not drama. Ninety minutes of prep, forty minutes until collection. The learner can do that sum themselves, which means the urgency is something they conclude rather than something the module asserts.
Priya being unreachable is not a plot device to force a wrong choice. It is there so that escalating upwards has a real cost later, rather than being a free correct answer.
Step 1 · Observe
What can you actually see?
Look at whatever you think is worth looking at. You can move on whenever you want to, including now.
None of these five reveal a key or unlock a door. Each one is a piece of evidence that supports or weakens a reading of the situation, and two of them point in opposite directions.
The learner is allowed to leave after looking at nothing. That is deliberate. If skipping observation carried no cost the step would be decoration, and if it were blocked the module would be telling the learner what mattered instead of letting them find out. So it costs them: two of the four ways to handle Dan only exist if you have seen the right things, and the debrief at the end counts what you looked at.
Step 2 · Infer
What do you think is going on?
Commit to a working read. You can change it later if something makes you.
Read C is the calibrated answer for a learner who has seen fewer than three things, and the module says so. Most scenario design punishes hesitation because confidence is easy to score. Here, saying "not enough yet" on thin evidence is treated as the better call, and saying it after you have seen everything is treated as under-committing.
Neither A nor B is the truth. The learner is not told that yet.
Step 3 · Predict
You are about to raise this with Dan
Before you do. What do you think he is going to do?
The learner is asked to predict Dan as though Dan were weather. He is not. On the next screen they choose how to approach him, and that choice is what decides which of these three things he actually does.
The debrief does not score the prediction as right or wrong. It shows them that they changed the answer after they gave it. That is the difference between modelling a person and modelling a mechanism, and it is very hard to teach by telling.
Step 4 · Decide
How do you open?
Some of these are only available because of what you looked at.
Two of these four options are hidden unless the learner examined particular things. Not greyed out with a padlock, which would just tell them they missed something. Absent, so the learner who observed nothing never knows the good option existed until the debrief.
Dan has his own position and it is not laziness. He is on a final written warning for lateness, so his first instinct under accusation is to defend himself, and that instinct costs the learner the information he holds. Approach him with evidence rather than blame and he gives it up. The incentive is his, not the learner's, and it is legible once you have seen the warning notice.
Step 5 · Revise
Does that change anything?
Your working read was
A fourth reading appears here that was not offered at step two: the order change was requested but never confirmed by anybody, so no one in the building knows what is true, including the customer.
That is the actual situation. It could not be offered earlier because the learner had no grounds for it, and offering it would have made step two a guessing game with a findable right answer. New evidence has to make a new understanding possible, not just make a previously listed option look better.
Step 6 · Act
It is twenty to eleven
Prep takes ninety minutes. Priya is back at half eleven. What do you do?
Every option costs something. Prep now and you may bin sixty items. Ring the customer and you have broken Priya's rule about staff ringing customers. Ring Priya and you have interrupted her for something the person standing next to you could have answered.
The best available action is to get Dan to make the call while you start prep, because it is the only one that runs the two tasks in parallel and uses the person who actually took the call. It exists only if Dan is willing to help you, which depends on how you opened with him two screens ago. The learner is never told that. They can work it out from the debrief.
What happened
Your reasoning, end to end
Where the chain held and where it gave way
What was actually true
Halbrook rang on Thursday afternoon and spoke to Dan. They asked to move the collection to half twelve. Dan said he would check with Priya, wrote it on the whiteboard with a question mark, and did not follow it up.
Priya never saw the note. Nobody rang Halbrook back. So on Saturday morning the shop believed eleven o'clock, the customer believed half twelve, and the only person who could tell you why was standing at the counter looking at his phone.
Nobody in this scenario did anything wrong enough to be sacked for. A message was taken and not closed off. That is the most common failure in a small workplace and it almost never looks like a failure while it is happening.
The loop is: observe evidence, work out what it means, commit to a reading, predict how somebody else will behave, act, and then see the consequence of the reasoning rather than of the click.
Four things make that more than a branching quiz. Evidence gates later options rather than unlocking content. The learner's own approach changes the behaviour they were asked to predict. The true reading is only reachable after new evidence, so revision is required rather than rewarded. And no ending is clean, so the debrief is about the quality of the reasoning rather than the correctness of the answer.
Built by DTTtech as the second module of Work Ready. Module 1 is live at workready.dtttech.com.
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