Practice with decisions that look like real work
Use evidence, respect constraints and explain the logic behind your recommendation.
Trace invoice corrections to a new intake path
A shared-service team sees supplier invoice corrections rise after a new digital intake route launches. Leaders propose retraining all processors, while manual rework hides the channel pattern.
After Action Review: learn from a flood response
A flood response delivered supplies on time overall, yet two remote districts received the wrong medication. Dispatch logs and field reports disagree.
Assumption Mapping: applied decision
A museum plans an AI guide for visitors with limited vision. Staff assume voice output is the main barrier; visitor interviews have not yet tested navigation or consent concerns.
BPMN: investigate a laboratory sample handoff
A hospital laboratory loses urgent samples between collection and analysis. The written procedure lists steps but no acknowledgment at the courier handoff.
Explain why support backlog rebounds after overtime
A software support team repeatedly uses overtime when backlog rises. Backlog falls for two weeks, rebounds higher, and attrition rises three months later. Leaders plan another overtime campaign.
Diagnose adoption of an AI-assisted field-service workflow
A maintenance company has launched a mobile workflow that uses an AI assistant to propose inspection steps. Training and account activation are high, but correct use differs sharply by role, connectivity and exception type.
Improve a Customer Onboarding Value Stream
A B2B software provider needs a median of 12 working days to activate a standard customer although active work totals about nine hours. Leaders propose AI-generated onboarding documents, while teams report incomplete hand-offs, batching and exception overload.
Organise a Multilingual Service-Desk Knowledge Base
Agents search three folders, a wiki and personal notes during customer calls. Two obsolete refund instructions remain discoverable, while the approved escalation form is known mainly to senior staff.
Redesign a Slow Proposal Workflow
A consultancy needs ten days to prepare a proposal. Leaders jump to an AI writer, but rework data points to vague scope, repeated standard text, late price checks and unclear approval ranges.
Select a Customer-Service Platform
A logistics firm is choosing among three service platforms. All claim strong routing and accessibility. The current favourite leads a draft matrix because vendor demonstrations were scored as production evidence.
Benchmark Proposal Turnaround Without Copying
A design consultancy takes nine working days from approved brief to authorised proposal. A vendor claims top performers deliver in 48 hours, and one internal office reports four days using more standardised service packages.
Separate an AI service incident from its innovation portfolio
A regional insurer is launching an AI-assisted claims service. A duplicate-payment defect is active, an integration latency problem has several technical explanations, customer response to new explanations is uncertain, and password resets follow a validated procedure.
DACI: govern a transit dispatch decision
A regional transit operator must decide whether to suspend an automated dispatch rule after a near miss. Safety, operations and vendors disagree.
Choose a Support Automation Operating Model
A subscription software company must choose how to automate first-line support. The options are a vendor-managed agent, an internally configured agent on an approved platform, or an agent-assist-only design. The steering group has mixed mandatory controls with desirable benefits.
Rank an AI Automation Backlog
A services firm can run one AI pilot next quarter. Four opportunities remain after compliance screening: proposal drafting, invoice exception triage, meeting-note extraction and knowledge-base maintenance. Stakeholders keep switching between value, ease and personal preference.
Forecast Autonomous Claims Handling
An insurer needs a planning range for the share of low-value claims that could be handled autonomously in three years without exceeding its error and complaint thresholds. Internal data is incomplete and expertise is distributed across claims, fraud, compliance, data science and customer advocacy.
Set Participation Rights for AI Refund Decisions
An ecommerce company is defining who should participate when an AI service recommends changing refund thresholds. The customer-operations director owns the policy, but finance, fraud, legal, support agents and the model team hold different information and will carry out the change.
Stress-Test a CRM Agent Deployment
A business-to-business software company plans to let a CRM agent enrich leads, draft follow-ups and schedule approved messages. The happy path is documented, but launch approval requires explicit contingency branches for credible failures.
Design Sprint: applied decision
A city considers a complex disaster-alert app. Residents currently miss evacuation instructions when messages use unfamiliar landmarks.
Double Diamond: investigate repeat calls at a clinic
A clinic wants an AI booking bot after complaints about long waits. Interviews reveal that unclear referral rules, not booking speed, drive most repeat calls.
EventStorming: trace substitutions before refunds
A food-delivery platform believes refunds start with customer complaints, but warehouse staff report that stock substitutions occur before the customer is notified.
Decision Room: Protect the Choice Under Time Pressure
NordForge Industrial Group manufactures industrial equipment at three sites. Over six months, OTIF fell from 94% to 87%, delays affected the three largest customers, urgent cross-functional escalations rose by 42%, and average response to a material deviation reached 2.4 days. A review of 120 delayed orders found that the largest time loss occurs at two cross-functional handoffs in 68% of cases. No single end-to-end owner exists. You must recommend a justified level of intervention without hiding uncertainty.
Fault Tree Analysis: applied decision
An orbital habitat risks losing breathable air. Two nominally independent scrubbers share a power bus, while manual fallback depends on the same alarm.
Should Northstar Enter the Clinic Market?
Northstar sells scheduling software to independent salons and is considering multi-location outpatient clinics. Leadership has prepared a broad expansion proposal but has not translated its evidence into strategic choices.
Refill Retail Under External Change
LoopMart operates 35 urban convenience stores and is considering refill stations for household products. The investment has a five-year life and depends on regulation, customer adoption and equipment economics.
Can a Last-Mile Platform Earn Attractive Margins?
RelayNow is evaluating a software-enabled marketplace connecting retailers with local delivery fleets. Demand is growing, but current platforms report weak margins.
Four Growth Directions for Field & Fork
Field & Fork sells premium chilled meals through supermarkets in one country. Growth has slowed, and management has proposed eight initiatives without distinguishing the source of growth.
Allocate Capital Across a Software Portfolio
A software group owns four products competing for next year’s investment budget. Management has assigned quadrant labels but has not validated the calculations or cross-product value.
A Warehouse Investment Across Four Futures
TransNova is considering a €45m automated warehouse with a 15-year life. The decision depends on labour availability and cross-border trade friction, both of which are highly uncertain.
Customer Complaints Increased by 35%
A scheduling platform received 35% more reminder complaints in May. Support leaders propose retraining agents, while engineering suspects a release defect.
Why Did the Orders Miss Dispatch?
Thirty-two priority orders missed the 17:00 dispatch cut-off at one distribution centre. The supervisor says the picker was too slow.
Map the Causes of Coating Defects
A metal-parts plant saw coating defects rise from 2.1% to 5.4% on Line 3 over six weeks. The plant manager believes the new operators are responsible.
Where Should the Contact Centre Focus?
A contact centre must reduce complaint-handling workload by 20%. Managers disagree whether to prioritise the most frequent issue or the issue with the highest handling cost.
Who Holds the Power in Compliance Automation?
A 70-person automation consultancy is considering a €1.2m product investment for regulated claims operations. Leadership calls the market attractive because demand is growing, but sales, delivery and finance use different market definitions. A cloud marketplace is simultaneously an infrastructure supplier, a lead source and a product complementor.
Which Fraud Pattern Deserves the First Control?
A payment provider can fund one fraud-control experiment this quarter. Operations wants the most frequent category, finance wants the largest loss, and risk wants every severe event escalated. A detection rule changed halfway through the month, so raw counts are not directly comparable over time.
What Caused the Temperature Excursion?
A medical-device distributor has quarantined four temperature-sensitive shipments after conflicting logger readings. No patient harm is reported. Operations wants to release the goods using stability data, while quality says the investigation cannot determine product disposition. The team must preserve evidence and follow the governing quality process.
Force Field Analysis: improve smart-meter access
A utility wants residents to adopt a new smart-meter portal. Enrollment is low because multilingual tenants cannot access accounts controlled by landlords.
Gemba Walk: applied decision
A theme-park operator reports perfect control checks, yet night staff repeatedly bypass a failing alert to keep visitor flow moving.
Hoshin Kanri: applied decision
A regional health network promises shorter referral waits. Clinics point out that incomplete referrals and staffing gaps, not just scheduling, determine delay.
Impact Mapping: make adult learning accessible
A public library plans a new portal to increase adult learning. Attendance data show that shift workers cannot use evening classes.
Design a Safer Discharge Experience
Riverside Day Clinic wants to reduce avoidable calls and mistakes after minor procedures. A manager has proposed a mobile app, but the team has not yet agreed on the underlying patient problem.
Can the Maintenance Subscription Work?
MechAssist repairs packaging equipment. It is considering a monthly subscription that combines remote monitoring, preventive visits and guaranteed response times for small manufacturers.
Why Do Consulting Firms Switch to Client Portals?
ClearSpace sells a client portal to small consulting firms. Marketing targets firms by headcount, but conversion varies widely within each size band.
Where Does the Solar Installation Journey Break?
SunHarbor installs rooftop solar for small businesses. Installation quality is high, but referrals and overall satisfaction have declined.
Fix the Outcome-Free Support OKRs
CloudDesk wants customers to solve common problems without contacting support. The team completed last quarter's roadmap, but ticket demand and customer effort did not improve.
Nominal Group Technique: applied decision
A research cooperative must allocate scarce lab time. Famous senior members dominate open discussion and junior safety concerns do not reach the agenda.
1-2-4-All: include quieter bus riders
A city planning workshop on bus route changes has sixty participants. A few officials dominate while night-shift riders are quiet.
OODA Loop: applied decision
A transit control room sees sudden crowding after a line closure. Historic patterns suggest one diversion, but live accessibility reports contradict it.
Map the Claims Intake Before Automating It
HarborSure wants AI to extract data from household claims. Customers wait days for a first decision even though intake activity takes minutes.
Protect the Security Review Constraint
BrightBid uses AI to draft enterprise proposals. Draft output tripled, but signed proposals and customer lead time have not improved.
Stress-Test the Refund Assistant
Northstar Retail is piloting an assistant that reads orders, policy and customer messages, then drafts refund amount, reason and destination for agent approval.
Prevent the Wrong-Account Payment
Keystone Services uses an AI assistant to draft supplier-payment instructions. Two drafts used old bank details from attachments instead of the verified supplier master.
Test Support Triage Before Scaling
CloudDesk wants an AI classifier to route incoming support tickets. Leaders want a full launch after a vendor demo.
Opportunity Solution Tree: improve course completion
A learning app targets better course completion. Users say reminders are noisy, but interviews show confusion about the next exercise and little feedback after attempts.
Define Customer Onboarding Before Automating It
A B2B software company wants an AI agent to automate customer onboarding. Sales, Finance, Implementation and customers use different start and end events, and 38% of provisioning requests arrive without validated integration settings.
Interpret Kano Evidence for an Invoicing Portal
A product team must choose the next invoicing-portal release. It surveyed export, automatic payment matching and an animated dashboard, but the sponsor wants to build whichever item receives the most Attractive classifications.
Protect AI-Assisted Payment Instructions
An AI assistant drafts supplier-payment instructions from email and invoices. A reviewer sees the generated instruction but not a direct comparison with authorised supplier data. Leaders list 'human approval' and 'training' as two independent preventive controls.
Map a Regional CRM Rollout
A services firm plans one CRM workflow across three regions. The programme has engaged country sales directors but not service agents, customers, works councils or information security.
Clarify an AI Service-Desk Launch
Operations, IT, Security, Legal, Customer Service and a vendor are preparing an AI-assisted service-desk launch. The plan says all teams jointly approve production, consultation has no deadline and nobody owns an urgent rollback.
RICE Prioritization: applied decision
A public health product team must choose between a wide-reaching reminder feature and a smaller accessibility repair needed by high-risk patients.
Standardized Work: applied decision
A remote research station has inconsistent equipment restart routines across crews; logs reveal that a recovery step is sometimes skipped.
Can a Strategy Session Stop Strategic Diffusion at Arcton Systems?
Arcton Systems manufactures temperature-control equipment for food warehouses and provides service support. It employs 480 people, has three regional offices and operates its own engineering team. Revenue growth has almost stopped, while the CEO has announced an ambition to double the business in three years and proposed a four-day strategy session for 28 leaders. The draft agenda starts with the CEO’s answer, several familiar frameworks, idea generation and ten priorities.
Build a Scorecard for AI-Assisted Service
A regional service company adopted an AI reply assistant. Leadership reports adoption and licence savings as strategic success, while retention for complex-account customers has fallen and repeat complaints have risen.
Blueprint an AI-Assisted Clinic Booking Service
A clinic network introduced an AI booking assistant. It offers appointments quickly, but referral validation, accessibility requests and rescheduling context fail across hidden hand-offs.
Run a Premortem for a Supplier Portal Launch
A manufacturer will launch an AI-assisted supplier portal in six weeks. The sponsor calls adoption inevitable; exception orders, identity matching and operational fallback remain weakly tested.
Calculate and Recover a Data-Migration Schedule
A company must migrate customer data before a contractual platform shutdown. The plan lists dates but does not show dependency logic, float or the effect of a scarce integration engineer.
Stabilise an AI Content-Review Flow
An AI content-review service has 31 items in progress, three reviewers and daily urgent requests. Active review is short, but waiting, rework and lost evidence make completion unpredictable.
Can an Offsite Accelerate Customer Launches at Atlas Cloud?
Atlas Cloud sells an enterprise document-management platform. In nine months, it has grown from 90 to 145 employees. Sales, Implementation, Security and Support work across three countries. The CEO has proposed a four-day offsite under the banner “One Atlas”, while leaders describe the central problem as a lack of trust.
Build a testable pathway for an AI benefits adviser
A public-interest organisation plans an AI benefits adviser. The draft pathway says deployment will improve household security and measures only completed chats.
Three Horizons: connect college funding and AI tutoring
A regional college wants AI-assisted tutoring. Existing funding rewards lecture attendance, while pilots improve access for working adults but raise privacy concerns.
Value Proposition Canvas: applied decision
A company pitches an AI companion to carers of long-lived digital agents. Interviews show that continuity and migration matter more than another entertaining feature.
Map an AI advisory platform before choosing what to own
A regional bank plans an AI financial-coaching service. Leaders assume owning every component creates advantage, while product, architecture, procurement and risk teams disagree about what is novel, productised or utility-like.