Communication, Teamwork, and Leadership
This domain tests whether you can make technical decisions legible and owned: audience-appropriate writing, an explicit decision structure, and a team where dissent is safe and recorded.
Core rules
- Write bottom line up front: decision, then evidence, then assumptions and limitations. Match depth to audience - the sponsor needs cost, risk and date; the fabricator needs dimensions, tolerances and hold points.
- RACI: exactly one Accountable per deliverable (the person who signs), Responsible parties do the work, Consulted give input two-way, Informed receive one-way updates. Two Accountables means no owner.
- Tuckman stages - forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning - predict friction; storming is normal development, not failure.
- Give feedback on behaviour and impact (situation–behaviour–impact), not personality. In negotiation, separate people from the problem and trade interests, not positions.
- Minute decisions, actions, owners and dates; version-control documents and state the revision on every transmittal.
Worked example
Two discipline leads disagree on a pipe route. Instead of escalating immediately, tabulate options against criteria weighted before scoring: capital cost 40%, constructability 25%, maintenance access 20%, schedule 15%. Option A (3, 4, 2, 5): 0.40(3) + 0.25(4) + 0.20(2) + 0.15(5) = 1.20 + 1.00 + 0.40 + 0.75 = 3.35. Option B (4, 3, 4, 3): 1.60 + 0.75 + 0.80 + 0.45 = 3.60. B wins. The weighting is the real argument - agree it in advance, publish the scores, and record the accountable owner in the minutes.
Traps
Confusing consensus with accountability; treating silence as agreement; relying on corridor conversations instead of written records; presenting every detail equally so the decision disappears; letting the loudest voice set weights after the scores are known.