Field note: Experts often describe work through stories, exceptions, and compressed phrases such as “use good judgment.” The designer’s task is not to flatten that expertise into a list of facts. It is to make the decisions, cues, actions, and standards visible enough to teach and assess.
Operational question
What should a learner be able to do in a representative situation, and what evidence would convince an expert that the performance is acceptable?
A workable method
- Elicit a recent critical case. Ask for the last time the task was difficult, not an abstract description. Explore what changed, what the expert noticed first, and which options were rejected.
- Probe decisions and cues. For each action, ask what information triggered it, what could be confused with it, and what consequence follows from a late or wrong decision.
- Draft action-condition-standard statements. Use observable verbs, representative constraints, and a defensible quality threshold. Include tools, time, references, and collaboration when they are part of real performance.
- Validate with more than one expert. Use a second expert and, when possible, a competent recent learner. Disagreement may reveal local variation, hidden assumptions, or a policy question.
What this looks like in practice
“Understand voyage risk” becomes: given a route, forecast, vessel limitations, and current notices, identify the three highest-consequence hazards, justify controls with approved sources, and state the conditions that would trigger replanning.
Evidence to collect
Choose a small set of measures before implementation. Record the baseline, the source of each measure, the review cadence, and who is authorized to act on the result.
- inter-rater agreement on acceptable performance
- coverage of critical cues and common errors
- learner success under representative constraints
Field checklist
- Write the decision, accountable owner, and decision date.
- Describe the current workflow and the conditions that shape performance.
- Confirm the source hierarchy, permissions, and local requirements.
- Test the method under representative—not merely convenient—conditions.
- Review both intended outcomes and burden on the people doing the work.
- Record a change, escalation, and stop rule before results arrive.
Watch-out
Observable does not mean simplistic. Judgment can be assessed through the quality of evidence, tradeoffs, escalation decisions, and explanation—provided the criteria are explicit.