Critical-incident Technique

The critical-incident technique is a means of eliciting data about effective or less effective behaviour that is related to examples of actual events – critical incidents. The technique is used with groups of job holders and/or their managers or other ‘experts’ (sometimes, less effectively, with individuals) as follows:

● Explain what the technique is and what it is used for, ie, ‘to assess what constitutes good or poor performance by analysing events that have been observed to have a noticeably successful or unsuccessful outcome, thus providing more factual and “real” information than by simply listing tasks and guessing performance requirements’. 

● Agree and list the key result in the role to be analysed. To save time, the analyst can establish these prior to the meeting but it is necessary to ensure that they are agreed provisionally by the group, which can be told that the list may well be amended in the light of the forthcoming analysis. 

● Take each area of the role in turn and ask the group for examples of critical incidents. If, for instance, one of the job responsibilities is dealing with customers, the following request could be made: ‘I want you to tell me about a particular occasion at work which involved you – or that you observed – in dealing with a customer. Think about what the circumstances were, for example who took part, what the customer asked for, what you or the other member of the staff did and what the outcome was.’ 

● Collect information about the critical incident under the following headings: what the circumstances were; what the individual did; the outcome of what the individual did. 

● Record this information on a flipchart. 

● Continue this process for each key result area. 

● Refer to the flipchart and analyse each incident by obtaining ratings of the recorded behaviour on a scale such as 1 for least effective to 5 for most effective. 

● Discuss these ratings to get initial definitions of effective and ineffective performance for each of the key result areas. 

● Refine these definitions as necessary after the meeting – it can be difficult to get a group to produce finished definitions. 

● Produce the final analysis, which can list the competencies required and include performance indicators or standards of performance for each key result area.