SLOP4700: The Meeting Before the Meeting: How Decisions Get Made
Most decisions are made before the meeting that announces them. This course teaches you to read agendas, minutes, invitations and silences as evidence, and to run a fair process yourself, using a semester-long fictional case and a live multi-role negotiation simulation.
What you will do
Read real, publicly documented decisions the way an investigator reads a paper trail — for what an agenda's wording assumes, what an invitation list omits, and what a set of minutes was written to make true. Then you'll run a decision yourself: a live, four-role negotiation over a fictional workplace proposal, played once and audited afterwards for what actually decided the outcome. The course follows one running fictional case, the Engagement Signal Pilot at Slop University, from its first announcement through to the decision that follows from it.
Who it is for
Anyone who is about to spend a career sitting in meetings and would rather understand how they actually work. No prior study of organisations, ethics or politics is assumed — the course teaches its own vocabulary from Week 1. What it does assume is a willingness to argue a position you may not personally hold, and to have that argument examined afterwards for the judgement and evidence behind it — never for how persuasive or confident you sounded while making it.
The twelve weeks
| Week | Topic | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Decisions Leave Traces | Reading agendas, minutes and emails as evidence, not narrative. lecture |
| 2 | Who Gets Invited? | Invitation lists as the first, quietest decision in any process. lecture |
| 3 | The Agenda Is an Argument | How naming, ordering and timing argue for an outcome. lecture |
| 4 | The Meeting Before the Meeting | Where a decision may already be forming before the room, and how you'd tell — from the record, not from suspicion. lecture |
| 5 | Information Arrives on Someone's Schedule | Timing as a lever some people control and others don't — not automatically a manipulation. lecture |
| 6 | Silence Is a Position — Sometimes | Reading what a record omits, and the several different things an abstention can mean. lecture |
| 7 | Power in the Room | Formal authority versus who the room actually defers to, and how you'd distinguish the two from a transcript. lecture |
| 8 | Dissent Without Disappearing | Registering disagreement in a record that survives it. lecture |
| 9 | Who Actually Decides | Decision rights, sign-off chains, and the difference between holding a veto and using one. lecture |
| 10 | Minutes Make Memory | How the written record becomes the decision, regardless of the room. lecture |
| 11 | The Ethics of Alignment | What a fair process owes the people it is run on. lecture |
| 12 | Redesigning the Decision | Turning a diagnosis into a process someone else could run. lecture |
All twelve weeks run the same way: a session page carries that week's case documents and in-class exercise, and its paired lecture carries the conceptual reading and links back to the session for the full text. Weeks 1 and 3 additionally have a slide deck each — see the Week 1 and Week 3 lectures; the Alignment Lab spans Weeks 9 to 11 and is assessed separately — see the Alignment Lab page for how its own schedule fits inside those three sessions.
Where to go next
Sessions
The weekly schedule and what happens in each teaching session.
Assessment
What is marked, what it is worth, and when it is due.
The Alignment Lab
How the course's four-role decision simulation runs, and a worked example.
Templates
The strategy memo, negotiation log, agenda and decision-record formats.
People
Who teaches the course and how to reach them.