Week 9 Audit: Auditing a strained notice

The audit gets harder here --- this week's notice doesn't split cleanly into "confident pitch" and "damning audit," and the session is about working with that instead of forcing it back into week 1's shape

3 May 2027

Week 1’s audit was a clean split: pitch on one side of the seam, plain audit on the other, and the group agreed on the sentence. This week’s notice resists that. The breaking-changes section doesn’t just correct the pitch, it undermines the premise the pitch is built on — and the rollback plan is neither a real plan nor a flat refusal. The audit skill this session practises is reading a notice that’s honestly ambivalent, without either flattening it into “obviously bad” or accepting the pitch at face value because it’s well-written.

Before the session#

Read this week’s notice against week 1’s. Bring one specific difference in how confidently each rollback plan is written, and don’t just say “week 9 is less confident” — say what in the text makes it less confident.

In the session#

We read the pitch aloud first, cold, the way a client would hear it. Then we read the breaking-changes section aloud and check who in the room changes their mind about the pitch, and on what sentence. Twenty minutes on the spec questions above, in pairs, then a shared list on the board of what “strained” actually looks like at the sentence level — this is the vocabulary your own Notice, due after this session, will be marked against.

Afterwards#

This audit’s spec lines are the marking language for File Your Own Notice. If a line here didn’t make sense against this week’s notice, say so before you write yours — it’s cheaper to fix now than after the assessment is submitted.