Handle a help request

A helper who can’t continue raises a request. It appears on your board immediately, marked against their zone, with their name.

What you’re looking at

Each request carries the kind the helper picked — missing gear, need another person, instructions are unclear, safety concern, or something else — plus whatever they wrote, and often a photo.

The kind matters more than it looks. Instructions are unclear is feedback on your plan and worth fixing before next time. Missing gear is usually a logistics problem you can solve from where you’re standing. Need another person is a scheduling problem. They need different responses, which is why the helper is asked to choose.

Take ownership first

Taking ownership marks the request as yours. The helper can see somebody has it, and so can anyone else who might have picked it up.

Do this even if you can’t fix it yet. The worst version of a request is one sitting untouched while three people assume someone else has it — and from the helper’s side, silence is indistinguishable from being ignored.

The report records who acknowledged each request and when, alongside who resolved it.

Resolving

Resolving means the problem is dealt with. Add a note saying what happened — that note ends up on the report, and in three weeks it’s the only record of why the run went the way it did.

If it turns out not to have been a problem, withdraw it instead. Withdrawing is not a quiet delete: both the request and its withdrawal are recorded.

They hold the run open, deliberately

Every request has to be resolved or withdrawn before the space can be confirmed ready. There’s no way to sign off around one.

This is the check that most often blocks a run, and that’s the design working. A space declared ready with an unanswered safety concern on it is exactly the outcome a readiness report exists to prevent.

Safety requests

Treat these as different, because they are. A safety concern is someone telling you the space could hurt somebody.

Worth saying plainly to your team: ReadyFactor is not an emergency channel. It’s a queue that a coordinator reads. If something is actually dangerous right now, the answer is a phone call or a raised voice, not a form. Make sure your helpers know that — it’s covered on their ask for help page too.

When the fix is the plan

If the same request appears every run, the problem isn’t the day — it’s the plan. Unclear instructions, gear that’s never where it’s meant to be, a task that genuinely needs two people and is written for one.

Fix it in the plan and it stops happening. That’s what the pattern in the reports is for.