Triage

More work arrives than the room can take. Each round they pick a couple of items to handle and everything they leave stays in the queue and gets a round older — which is where the whole activity lives. What each item costs is hidden while choosing and revealed after, because a description and how long it has waited is all anyone gets in the real version. Some things get worse waiting, some get cheaper, and a few sort themselves out, so handling those early is a real mistake that felt like good work. The debrief compares what the room paid against the cheapest that was actually available and names the item that hurt most. Five looks ship with it — the activity’s own, plus a kitchen pass, a harbour, a control room and a winter market, drawn in the file itself with no images to load.

Open the activityDownload

Problem

Prioritisation is normally taught with a matrix, and a matrix quietly implies the right answer was knowable at the moment of choosing. It was not. People do not fail at this because they cannot rank things — they fail because the loudest item is in front of them and the expensive one is silent.

Who it helps

Operations, billing, patient access and support teams who work a queue, and team leads deciding what their people work on next.

In training

Make them argue out loud before committing, and write the reasoning on a whiteboard — the debrief is much stronger when you can point at what they said at the time. Run it twice with different capacities if you have the session length: the same queue at one item per round teaches something quite different from three. Finish on the item flagged as costliest and ask what could have told them, at that moment, that it was the one.

Skills shown

Prioritisation activity design, hidden-cost modelling with ageing curves, opportunity-cost scoring against a reachable optimum, live queue simulation, in-browser editing with persistent export.