Start the day, delegate the four workstreams, and find out who is actually able to do the work before the deadline does it for you.
Type: Exercise block
What it does: Supervisions place the learner in charge of a simulated team and require them to delegate work, monitor progress, coach colleagues, and meet a deadline.
When it is useful: Use a Supervision to train delegation, prioritisation, leadership, project management, and quality control.
A team, a tray of work, and a clock: The learner reads the brief, starts the day, and delegates each assignment from the tray to a member of their team. The clock runs in simulated minutes against a deadline — fast-forwarding while they observe, dropping to real time while they sit with someone — so attention spent on one person is time the working day loses.
Claimed skills versus real ability: Every team member shows the skills they claim and what they say about their experience. Behind that, the author sets what they are actually capable of, how fast they work, how much they can hold, and how likely they are to admit they are stuck. The learner never sees those numbers. Each assignment shows the skill it needs beside a team that all look plausible on paper, which is exactly how a confident but wrong allocation gets made.
Getting stuck, quietly: When an assignment is harder than the person doing it, their progress stops at about a third. Some raise a hand; others go silent and look busy. Discovering the silent one before the deadline is the skill the block exists to train. Checking in opens a conversation, and when someone is blocked on a point of law the learner must answer their question in their own words — a weak answer costs quality on that piece of work.
Three criteria, no partial credit: At the deadline the run is marked on whether everything was delivered in time, the quality of the worst delivered assignment, and how the team was left — anxiety, anger, exhaustion, and whether the workload was shared fairly. All three must pass. A debrief then shows what happened and when, so the learner can see the moment the day was lost.
The situation: A litigation team has three days to complete a disclosure review. One junior knows the documents well but is overloaded, another is fast but inexperienced with privilege, and a paralegal is highly organised but has not received clear authority. A new document source then appears while the client asks for an urgent progress update.
The problem: Poor delegation produces duplicated work, missed privileged documents, inconsistent issue coding, and a progress report that cannot be trusted. Waiting until the final day to check the work makes those failures difficult to repair.
The simulation: The learner assigns review, privilege analysis, chronology, and reporting tasks. Team members ask questions, report problems, or remain silent depending on the instructions and support they receive. The learner must rebalance work, create escalation points, and review high-risk output personally.
The result: Learners practise matching work to capability, giving usable instructions, checking progress without micromanaging, and intervening before a supervision problem becomes a missed deadline.