Judgement-led exercises

A judgement-led exercise places the participant inside a situation rather than in front of a question. Instead of recalling or recognising the correct answer, the participant must decide what to do based on incomplete information, competing pressures, and context. Choices carry consequences that shape what happens next, reinforcing how decisions influence outcomes over time.

This differs from a recognition-led exercise, where the focus is on identifying the correct interpretation or application of a policy, rule, or threshold. Recognition-led exercises test whether participants can recognise what applies and select the appropriate response. Judgement-led exercises test how participants reason, prioritise, and act when the answer isn't black-and-white.

Judgement-led exercises are commonly used to explore situations such as:

• Ethical choices where each option has a cost (reputation, money etc).

• Trade-offs between speed, safety, and compliance

• Decisions made with incomplete or conflicting information

• Conflicting stakeholder priorities

• Ambiguous ownership or unclear authority

• Long-term consequences triggered by short-term fixes

Because the default option for Colibri exercises is a quiz (recognition-led exercise), if you want to create a more judgement-led exercise, you'll need to first generate a quiz and then either delete that tab or augment it.

The steps below are recommendations for how to build your exercise from scratch.

1

Define purpose & audience

Start by articulating the decision tension, not the content. This is usually a trade-off, dilemma, or ambiguity rather than a question with a right answer. Example: speed versus accuracy, escalation versus containment, transparency versus control.

If you cannot describe the judgement in one sentence, the exercise will drift. This lack of focus will lead to disengagement and possible confusion.

2

Define the consequences

Decide what kinds of consequences matter if the participant chooses poorly or well. These might be operational, ethical, reputational, or human. You are not planning a full storyline – only what can plausibly change.

This stage ensures choices have weight before any content is written.

3

Identify serials

Break the exercise into serials that reflect changes in context or pressure rather than necessarily chronology. A new serial could exist because something has shifted – information, time pressure, stakeholder involvement, or risk level.

This encourages modular design.

Remember that your exercise will likely branch based on player choices so while there is a kind of time-sequence the player journey might not always be linear

You might also like to organise content into serials to make it easy to find

4

Create anchor outcomes for each serial

For each serial, create rows that represent the states the participant can reach by the end of that phase.

If you start building where your exercise begins, you'll be trying to link to content that doesn't exist yet. That's fine of course but you'll have to do a second pass to link after the forward content has been created. "Working backwards" is more efficient but it also ensures you have strong ending(s) - which is important.

5

Add interactions

Add rows and choices, and now link to those forward rows.

It can be tricky to build everything in reverse so you might need a little inefficiency to allow your creativity to express itself

6

Layer narrative and detail

After you have your "tent pole" questions/interactions that move the exercise forward, add the additional content to provide explanations, reference information and world-building.

7

Check reverse linking

Check the "activated by" tab on each row to make sure you don't have any orphaned content that's not being published and twirl down the row check for the message "one of more options not connected"