What this is
Most safety training asks whether you would make the right call
This one assumes you would. It asks something harder. Could anyone tell afterwards?
You run a road job for five months. Fourteen ordinary decisions: a traffic plan, a labour hire agreement, a request for nine thousand four hundred dollars of signals, two near misses, a bloke at prestart who says the taper looks short.
Separately, and at a cost, you choose what to write down. Then a worker is killed, and you are examined on the record you made at the time. Everything you thought about and did not record appears on screen, struck through, beside the answer you are allowed to give.
That gap is the whole point. A good decision and a defensible decision are not the same thing, and the difference is the record.
How to play
- Read the situationEach decision gives you the month, what has happened, and three or four options. None of them is obviously wrong, and all of them are defensible to somebody.
- Choose what you doThis is the decision itself, weighed against section 18: the likelihood, the degree of harm, what you know or ought reasonably to know, what controls are available, and only after all of that, the cost.
- Then choose what goes on the recordA separate choice. Nothing at all, a bare log, the decision with your reasoning, or the full account including what you considered and rejected.
- Spend your attentionYou have twenty points. Recording all fourteen decisions properly would cost more than forty. You cannot do it, so you have to choose, and you do not yet know which decisions will matter.
- Finish the jobFive months. Fourteen decisions. Then the thing everybody knew was coming.
- Attend the examinationYou answer only from your record. What you did not write down does not exist, however clearly you remember it.
- Read the findingA finding, then every decision laid out: what you did, what you recorded, and whether it came out defensible, unevidenced or aggravating. Plus the five matters of section 18, and a separate view against the six limbs of officer due diligence under section 27.
Fifteen minutes on your own. Play it twice. The first run teaches you the trap and the second run is where it actually lands, because the second time you know the death is coming and you still cannot afford to record everything.
Running it with a group
Split the room in half. One half runs the job and makes the decisions. The other half are counsel assisting, and they get the full file, including everything the first half chose not to record. Then they examine each other on it.
Nobody argues about whether documentation matters after that. Allow half a day, or a full day if you want the officer duty examined properly as well.