08 October 2026
Scaling decision-making: how to help people practise good judgement and support it in the moment
Think about the moments that matter in your organisation.
A nurse faces a patient who is refusing their medication. A solicitor has a client who is keen to onboard, but the know-your-customer checks have raised questions. A colleague gets an email that looks legitimate, from someone they know. A leader is deciding how far to involve their team in a change.
None of these is a knowledge problem. Each one is a decision made under pressure, and the quality of those decisions is what compliance, customer service and leadership come down to.
Organisations know this matters, and few are equipped for it
Harvard Business Review Analytic Services surveyed 464 executives and 86% agreed that frontline workers need better technology and more insight to make good decisions in the moment, yet fewer than a quarter said they currently have a truly empowered workforce.
That gap is where L&D can make a difference. The question is how to close it at scale.
What we already know about learning that changes behaviour
The research, and our own experience, point the same way. Learning changes performance when it is:
- Stimulating: realistic, problem-centred, and demanding enough that you have to engage.
- Specific: connected to your role and context, so you can see yourself in it. It feels like an investment in you.
Realism, relevance and practice are what make learning stick. The challenge has always been scale. You can run role plays and bring people together, but not for thousands of people across hundreds of sites working 24/7.
Branching e-learning scenarios were the usual answer. Any instructional designer knows how that ends: multiple paths, content that mushrooms, and something very hard to maintain. And real life doesn’t offer three neat multiple-choice options. A nurse with a distressed patient has to pull her options from memory and act on them.
A word on what AI is (and isn’t) for
A quick note first, because it’s the elephant in the room.
This isn’t about asking AI to generate piles of content, and it isn’t about reducing headcount. It’s about making the heads you have count: investing in your people so that in the moments that matter, they decide with confidence.
The latest research suggests leaders see it the same way. A 2025 Wharton survey of more than 800 enterprise leaders found three in four report positive returns on their Gen AI investments, and 89% believe Gen AI augments work. The same study also found 43% of leaders warn of skill atrophy. That is a risk well-designed practice can help address, and it is firmly L&D territory.
Practise: dynamic scenarios at Priory Group
Priory Group is a distributed organisation with 200 to 300 sites across the UK, a workforce ranging from newly qualified to very experienced, and shift patterns that run seven days a week. Training teams are stretched, so every intervention has to be efficient.
We’d already worked with Priory on a preceptorship portal for newly qualified nurses, built on Breeio. It was a success, and the Head of Nursing asked a bigger question: how do we bring all our nurses into something like this? She chose decision-making as the focus, because critical thinking sits at the heart of nursing.
So Priory’s nurses now work through dynamic scenarios built into Breeio. Here is how one plays out:
A realistic, role-specific situation. A patient is refusing their medication. The nurse must weigh the patient’s wishes against safeguarding duties, including mental capacity and deprivation of liberty considerations.
Immediate feedback. She sees where her decision reflected policy and best practice, and where she could have gone further.
A story that keeps evolving. Next comes: what if the patient’s capacity appeared to fluctuate over the course of the day? How would you keep your assessment valid? The scenario keeps pushing her thinking.
A summary and development suggestions. She can take them to the Breeio objectives coach, set a personal development goal, and discuss it with her mentor. Reflective practice matters in nursing, and it matters just as much in legal and other regulated professions.
Breeio knows who the learner is: their name, role, company, sector, and the course the scenario sits in. A staff nurse and a senior staff nurse can therefore take the same scenario and get different experiences and different feedback. The staff nurse is judged on clinical judgement. The senior nurse is also judged on how they led the team and oversaw the ward.
Priory’s nurse development team built these scenarios themselves, using a short form in Breeio’s scenario engine. No design agency was needed, and no branching tree to maintain. Priory has since been recognised as a winner in the Digital Nursing Digital Practice Proven Concept category and a finalist for Preceptorship Programme of the Year. The team is also up for Nursing Times Workforce Awards in Best Workplace for Learning and Development, and Team of the Year.
Support: help in the moment, after the training ends
Practice is half the picture. The other half is what happens on the ward, in the office or on the shop floor, when someone needs an answer now.
Most organisations hold hundreds of policies, often 70 pages long, which people tick a box to say they’ve read. That doesn’t help anyone decide well in the moment.
Breeio’s AI assistant lets people ask questions in plain language and get answers drawn from your own policies. A nurse asking about care planning is asked about the person she’s planning for, guided through it, pointed to the relevant policy and, if she needs it, given the document to download. Administrators decide what goes into the assistant’s knowledge base: compliance policies, product information, client onboarding guidance, whatever your people need.
It isn’t only nursing
- Pharmaceuticals: a fast-growing company’s new salespeople were failing certification role plays with physicians, a failure rate of around 50% that created resets and a heavy load on the training team. After practising those conversations with AI-supported tools, that fell to under 5% within the first three months, and people reached the field faster.
- Semiconductor manufacturing: in a high-security, high-risk environment, staff practise cybersecurity decisions.
- Business education: a US business school puts students in the seat of a COO or head of supply chain, applying theory to real-world situations. A journal article on this work has been submitted for publication.
Four lessons from the field
1. Make trade-offs visible. If you pour your effort into patient A, something should happen later in the story that shows what it cost patient B. Workplace decisions are messy, and good scenarios show that.
2. Let people save and resume. Nobody can protect an hour of uninterrupted time on a busy ward. Learners can leave a scenario partway through and pick up where they left off.
3. Remember that tools still need engagement. Powerful tools only work if people give them their full attention. That’s true of every piece of learning.
4. Keep humans in the loop. Priory’s mentors, one-to-ones and virtual cohort sessions are what turn scenario practice into shared learning. Newly qualified nurses told us how much it helped to compare experiences with colleagues across the country.
Start with the business outcome, not the technology
Before choosing any tool, I use a simple sequence with every client:
1. What is the business objective? Reduce risk, improve quality, sharpen leadership decisions?
2. What business KPI will move if we get this right?
3. What do people need to do differently? Think awareness, attitude and action.
4. What training approach follows from that?
5. What in the environment helps or hinders? Structure, management, culture, HR measures and IT all matter, as does how you communicate the change.
6. How will we measure the change in behaviour and, ultimately, in the KPI?
Technology comes in at step four, not step one.
An exciting time for L&D
For years we’ve known that realistic, relevant practice changes behaviour, and we haven’t been able to deliver it at scale. Now we can, and we can back it up with support when people need it most. That is skills enhancement, which is exactly where L&D lives.
Want to see how this could work for your people? Book a demo or a call with the team.