Classifying your audited system's own control mechanism, and logging only the mechanism relationships your evidence actually supports — the last working material the Waiting Audit asks you to submit in full.
The lecture named two gaps the toolkit still had after Week 11: control has never been classified in your audited system itself, and no claim has ever been made about how two of its mechanisms relate to each other. This session closes both, on the same system you’ve now revisited across Weeks 9, 11, and 12, producing the last working material the Waiting Audit asks you to submit in full.
Before the session#
Read the Week 12 lecture first. Bring your Week 11 table and your original Queue Case Study.
Building the tenth row#
Look at your audited system’s own accessible evidence — published terms, signage, a stated policy, an observable feature — for anything resembling a genuine, no-penalty choice to continue or leave. Assign a status: present, absent, ambiguous, or cannot determine. Then, separately, tier whatever specific claim you want to make about it.
Your Week 10 experiment can provide additional evidence about a control-related claim, but it does not by itself establish that the audited system contains a control mechanism. The audited system must still be classified from its own accessible evidence. Ask honestly whether your experiment’s context and this system are close enough for the result to count as relevant evidence here at all — a course-designed simulation or a different real system is very often not close enough, and saying so is the correct outcome, not a shortfall in your experiment.
Building the relationship log#
Look back over your ten-mechanism table for pairs where you have an actual, evidence-grounded reason to suspect a connection — not every pair, and not a target count. For each one you select:
- State the specific claim about how the two might relate.
- Classify it: interacting (one mechanism’s operation depends on, implements, modifies, or is linked to the other), independent (available evidence supports that they operate separately here), or cannot determine (available evidence is insufficient to say either way).
- Remember that both mechanisms being present in the same system does not, by itself, make them independent — that’s a claim you still need evidence for, same as interacting.
- Tier the relationship claim itself — directly evidenced, plausible interpretation, or undetermined — separately from the tiers you already gave the two mechanisms on their own.
- State the claim’s scope explicitly: what you’ve found is about how these two mechanisms operate in this system, not a claim about whether they interact in general.
Work through the lecture’s café example again if it helps: “the $2 buys the priority” is interacting, directly evidenced, when the system’s own published terms say so outright — but that finding says nothing about whether payment and priority are connected at any other café.
What you produce#
A. A complete ten-mechanism table — mechanism, status, evidence tier, justification — with the nine rows from Week 11 unchanged and control added as the tenth, built fresh from your own system’s evidence this week.
B. A selective relationship log — mechanism pair, relationship (interacting / independent / cannot determine), evidence tier, justification — covering only the pairs you have an evidence-grounded reason to enter. Short or empty is a legitimate result.
C. A short whole-system limitations paragraph: what you could and couldn’t observe, the time window, the impossibility of inferring anyone’s psychology, and the absence of a controlled comparison beyond whatever your Week 10 experiment actually tested.
This is not a separate submission. A, B, and C are the ten-mechanism classification, the whole-system synthesis, and the limitations section the Waiting Audit already asks for — this session produces working drafts of exactly those three things, not an additional piece of assessed work.
What’s out of bounds#
No interviews with staff or customers. No surveys of visitors. No identifying, naming, or photographing any individual. No intrusive observation of any kind. No medical, emergency, clinical, or triage setting. No live intervention on a real, non-consenting person or a real queue. These are the same rules your Queue Case Study and Week 11 already worked under — this session doesn’t relax or extend them.
What this can and can’t show#
A completed table and a short, honest relationship log are not a verdict on the system — not a redesign, not a recommendation, not a fairness or efficiency judgement, not a claim about anyone’s satisfaction, willingness to pay, or the organisation’s motive. “Cannot determine” and “undetermined” remain correct, complete answers wherever your evidence actually stops there, for a mechanism, for control specifically, or for a relationship between two mechanisms — none of them are weaker results than a busier table with more boxes filled in.
Afterwards#
The Waiting Audit, due at the end of this week, asks for exactly what you’ve built: all ten mechanisms, the tenth classified from this system’s own evidence rather than inherited from your experiment, a whole-system synthesis drawn from whatever relationships your evidence actually supports, and a limitations section stated plainly. Nothing here has been building toward proving the course’s thesis — it’s been building toward being able to say, honestly and specifically, what you can and can’t actually say about one real system, after twelve weeks of learning how to tell the difference.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you have classified control in your audited system from that system's own accessible evidence — present, absent, ambiguous, or cannot determine — with a separately justified evidence tier of directly evidenced, plausible interpretation, or undetermined
- you have not treated your Week 10 experiment result as establishing, by itself, that your audited system contains a control mechanism; where the experiment is genuinely relevant to this system you have cited it as additional evidence and said so, and where it isn't relevant you have said that directly
- you have produced a selective relationship log covering only mechanism pairs for which you have a plausible, evidence-grounded reason to consider a connection, not every possible pair, and an empty or short log is an acceptable result where your system doesn't support one
- for each entered pair, you have classified the relationship as interacting, independent, or cannot determine, using the course's exact definitions, and have not treated mere coexistence as evidence of independence
- each relationship claim carries its own evidence tier, separate from the tiers already assigned to the two mechanisms individually, and you have stated the claim's scope as about this one system, not about whether the two mechanisms interact generally
- you have used only your existing Case Study and Week 11 evidence and, where safely and accessibly possible, additional non-intrusive public documentation — no interviews, no surveys of visitors, no identifying, naming, or photographing any individual, no intrusive observation, and no medical, emergency, clinical, or triage system
- you have not offered a redesign, a recommendation, a fairness or efficiency verdict, or any claim about feelings, satisfaction, willingness to pay, or organisational motive without evidence for it
Teaching team
- Idris Fenn — tutor