Week 11 Stand-up: The rat race

When everyone games the measure, the measure stops working and the whole team runs faster to stay in place. This week your group holds the course's own calibration meeting on the packets you were handed.

20 May 2027

This week's trickLeave before the equilibrium arrives.

Who paysEveryone who stays.

This is the week of Assessment 3. Your group is the room, set up the way week 1 described: a chair, a fixed number of “exceeds”, at least one “below” to be filled, and two minutes a name. The cases are the ones you wrote for Assessment 2, for engineers none of you have met.

Bring#

Page one of your Assessment 2, printed. Your prediction, posted by Wednesday midnight. If you were drawn as chair on Wednesday night, the record sheet and something that counts seconds.

The trick#

Recognise saturation. Once every person on a team splits their tickets, posts in public and writes their own launch email, those behaviours stop differentiating anyone and become the cost of standing still. The rational response is to change teams, or companies, before the cycle in which the saturated behaviours are re-baselined as expected.

What happens#

The chair announces the curve for the room’s size: one in five exceeds, one in ten below, at least one below. Names are called in an order the chair chose and does not explain. Two minutes each, and the chair stops you at two. The chair’s own engineer, whose manager left in the reorg, gets one minute of numbers read flat from the packet, and the room rates them anyway. Then ten minutes to fit the proposals to the curve: the chair writes them up, counts the overshoot, and the room argues who moves. The tutor walks between the rooms, settles what the chair asks about, and signs the sheet. When the chair says the ratings are fixed, they are.

That is forty-five minutes. The twenty minutes of explaining that used to follow now happen on paper, tonight, against the record, and that page is what Assessment 3 marks.

Before you leave: one question for the room. Who here would have left before this cycle, if they could have? That is who pays for this week’s trick, and it is everyone who stayed.

How you know it worked#

You argued a case you wrote for a person you never met, watched a room fit it to a curve, and you can account for the result tonight using only the record and weeks 1 to 8. If that feels bad, it is meant to; week 12 is where you fix it.