Am I the only one seeing this?

~10 minutes

Client Services

4 decisions

Intermediate

Financial Management

What a Coaching Scenario is

Not quiz style. This is judgement practice — you're put inside a real situation from human-services work and asked what you would actually do. It draws on the knowledge you use on the job, not the kind you can look up.

Every choice changes what happens next, and every choice gets a coaching beat straight after it: what drew you toward that option, and how it played out. What's held back is the verdict on your path, so you stay with what you'd genuinely do rather than working out what you're supposed to say.

4 decisions: Each one shaped by the one before it. No two paths through are the same.
Coaching as you go: A beat after every decision, naming the pull behind your choice and where it led.
A full debrief: Your whole path replayed at the end, with the reasoning behind each decision you made.
Evidence you can keep: A completed scenario is recorded in your PracticeLab and appears in your downloadable ProofKit.

Scenarios are made to be talked about. Most people finish one still turning it over, which makes them a ready-made prompt for supervision, a team meeting or a conversation with a colleague — everyone walks the same situation, and comparing where you each landed is often where the real learning happens.

This one ends with

Next time you access shared funds or resources, take 60 seconds to check whether records are current — catching small gaps early is the easiest version of this conversation.

The situation

You are a client services worker at a community social service. Your team shares a petty cash float that's kept in a lockbox in the storeroom. It's used for things like taxi vouchers for clients, small office supplies, and emergency food vouchers. A few people on the team have the combination, including you.

This morning you need to grab some cash to reimburse a client's bus fare — a straightforward, routine draw. When you open the lockbox you expect to find the float sitting neatly with the log book and a wad of receipts. Instead, the log book is half-filled in, several entries have no amounts recorded, and there are loose receipts stuffed in without matching entries. When you count the cash it's noticeably short of what the log says should be there — not by a few cents, but by enough to notice.

You stand there for a moment wondering if you're reading it wrong. But the more you look, the more it seems clear: the records don't reconcile with the cash on hand. You think about the last few months. Nobody has raised this at a team meeting. Nobody has mentioned anything to you. Your manager hasn't flagged it either. Maybe this is just how it's always been, and you're the only one who finds it odd.

You put the receipts back in and close the box. Now you're standing in the storeroom trying to figure out what to do next.

What you're practising

Financial accountabilityDuty to reportDocumentationProcedural fairnessWhistleblower protections

Before you start, notice

Real-world decisions in scenarios like this are shaped as much by feeling as by reasoning. People often notice one of these pulls — naming what you feel before you decide is half the skill.

Self-doubt — the worry that you're overreacting or making a big deal out of nothing
Loyalty to colleagues — the discomfort of potentially getting someone in trouble
Urgency to just get the task done and not make it everyone's problem
The pull to let sleeping dogs lie — if no one else has said anything, maybe there's a reason

Policies this draws on

Your organisation's petty cash policy
Your organisation's fraud and misconduct policy
Your organisation's complaints and reporting procedure
Public Interest Disclosure Act (AU jurisdictions) / Protected Disclosures (Protection of Whistleblowers) Act 2022 (NZ)
Your own organisation's policies take precedence — check them where they apply.

Heads up — coaching scenarios work differently. You'll make a sequence of decisions as the situation unfolds, and after each one you'll get a coaching beat: what drew you toward that choice, and how it played out. The one thing held back is the verdict on the path you took — that lands in the debrief at the end, with your whole walk replayed alongside it.

New to Good Practice Hub? Coaching Scenarios come with PracticeLab Pro, or browse the practice library to see what else is there.

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