OCE.12:4.2 - Select a contribution and capable participants

Choose a Method suited to the difficulty. Examples include a preparation brief, a huddle when the situation changes, a conversation about role performance, task-focused feedback, a debrief, inquiry with participants about the help they need, negotiation over incompatible contributions, and coaching or another intervention to develop the required capability. State the result it should produce and why it fits.

Obtain willing people with the competence and time to make the contribution. Distinguish the tasks of facilitating, providing domain expertise, making decisions, supplying resources, coaching and helping peers. Match each needed task with someone competent and, where required, authorized to perform it. A capable facilitator may lack the expertise to assess professional competence; a manager may allocate time without knowing how to coach the task.

When help requires a change in work, recover a representative task, the participant’s aims, current instructions, time allocation and the way performance is evaluated. Identify who understands the work and who can change each condition. Specify the help as an action: demonstrate an operation, diagnose an error, give feedback, arrange practice, allocate work or judge a result. Combine the needed contributions into a workable arrangement. OCE.4 helps design their relations; OCE.6 establishes the assignments, access and authority needed to act. Use OCE.5 only when a continuing position must be established or changed.

A mentor without managerial authority can explain, demonstrate and critique. If acting on that help requires different assignments or evaluation, obtain those changes from the people who control them. Include displaced work and its receivers when reallocating time; use 4.3.1 if the demands must be negotiated. If the manager already supplies the needed help competently, an additional mentor title may add nothing. If the manager cannot teach the task, obtain capable help. Where the existing conditions already permit useful assistance, arrange it directly.

Secure people’s agreement to participate and the protection needed for candid discussion. For peers and volunteers, confirm who can commit their work time and what they have agreed to do. Permission to facilitate gives no right to demand protected information or make another professional’s decision.