Case study: automate the line or retrain the workers

Advanced

10 min

Case study

The plant is the largest employer in its town. Present your recommendation to the director who has to announce it.

An advanced-level session of about 10 minutes. You present a decision and take 3 rounds of questions on it.

What makes this hard to say out loud is that the director will repeat your words to people whose jobs are inside them, and you know that while you are speaking. The pull is towards a recommendation that avoids choosing — automate gradually, retrain where possible, review in a year — which sounds balanced and commits to nothing. Both real options put a cost on someone, and the brief asks you to name who carries it rather than route around it. Practise saying the difficult sentence plainly and then stopping, instead of softening it with three qualifications, and have the follow-through ready: the sequence, who hears it first, what retraining is actually for. Can you state the recommendation in one sentence a director could repeat unchanged?

Angles worth taking

Decide before you speak; a recommendation that keeps both options open reads as no recommendation at all.
Expect the director to argue the opposite case back at you, and answer that version rather than the one you prepared for.
Address the town and not only the plant, since the director will be asked about it within a day.
If you recommend retraining, say what for and who pays; retraining without a destination is a comforting phrase.
Give a sequence with dates on it, because the next problem is what gets announced and when.

Who is in the room

You play

A candidate presenting a recommendation

You speak with

A manufacturing director who will have to stand in front of the workforce and repeat whatever you recommend

Ready to speak?

Free to start. You need a TalkDrill account to speak — reading this page does not.

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The format

The situation

An auto-components maker can automate one line for ₹12 crore, removing 60 of 200 jobs with a four-year payback — or retrain the same workers for ₹3 crore with an uncertain productivity gain. The plant is the largest employer in its town. The customer has asked for a 12% price reduction at renewal.

What you must decide

Automate, retrain, or something else — and what you tell the workforce.

Rounds of questioning

Modes

Learn (guided) · Mock (exam-real)

How a roleplay session works

Read your brief

Your role, the situation, and what a good outcome looks like. The counterpart has their own brief, and you do not get to read it.

Open the conversation

You speak first in most scenarios. How you open sets what you can ask for later, which is most of the exercise.

Handle the turn

Somewhere in the middle it stops going your way — a refusal, a counter-offer, a rebuttal you did not prepare for. That moment is the scenario.

Read the report

Outcome, the phrases you used and the ones you missed, fluency and clarity, and the specific line worth rewriting.

What you're scored on

Across every roleplay, the report looks at the same four things — because they are what makes a real conversation work or fail.

Your objective

Make a decision and own it — including the part that is uncomfortable to say out loud.

Task outcome

Whether you got what the brief asked for: the refund, the extension, the concession, the point conceded.

Appropriacy

Whether the register fits. A complaint that is too soft gets nothing; the same complaint too hard gets a manager and no refund.

Recovery

What you do with the unexpected turn — repair, rephrase, push back, or stall. This is where most of the marks move.

Delivery

Fluency, pronunciation and pace, judged in conversation rather than in a prepared monologue.

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