Decision System Redesign

The capstone — redesign the process behind a decision, using what the Alignment Lab audit taught you about how your own group actually decided.

Due: 24 May 2027 at 12:00 pm AEST · Weight: 35%

The brief#

Take a decision-making process — the semester’s case, your Alignment Lab group, or a real process you have access to — and redesign it so that its next decision is more challengeable, more traceable, and clearer about who is accountable for it.

This is the course’s thesis turned into a design problem, and the goal is not to eliminate pre-meeting coordination. Weeks 1–10 argued that talking before a formal meeting is often how a decision gets made well — by working through disagreement somewhere a fixed agenda has no room for it — and just as often how it gets made badly, by settling something before the people it affects ever get a documented chance to weigh in. A redesign that simply bans conversation before the meeting does not fix that; it just pushes the same trade-off somewhere less visible. The Alignment Lab gave you first-hand evidence of how your own group’s process actually worked, against how it looked on paper. Use that evidence to design a process where, whatever coordination happens before the room, the eventual decision can still be questioned, traced back to what informed it, and pinned to someone who answers for it — not a process with no informal channel at all.

What you submit#

A redesign document, 1,800–2,400 words, that:

1. Names the process being redesigned and who currently makes its decisions.
2. States what is wrong with it today, citing specific evidence — from the semester’s case, from your own Alignment Lab audit, or both. “Wrong” here means hard to challenge, trace, or attribute — not “involves informal conversation before the meeting.”
3. Proposes a concrete replacement: who is invited, when, on what information, with what record kept and by whom, and what channel (if any) still exists for the kind of informal, pre-meeting coordination that Weeks 1–10 showed can be genuinely useful.
4. Names who loses influence under the new design, and does not pretend the redesign is free. Slower, more accountable decisions cost someone something — usually the people who benefited from speed or from low visibility.
5. Tests the replacement against at least one concrete scenario — a specific decision the current process would have to face — and walks through what the new design would actually produce, step by step.

A redesign that makes everyone equally powerful is not a redesign; it is a wish, and neither is a redesign that pretends no one will ever talk before the meeting again. The strongest submissions make a specific, defensible trade-off between speed, coordination and accountability, and argue for it.

Teaching sessions end with Week 12; this submission is due two weeks later, giving you time away from the weekly schedule to write it up properly rather than rushing it out on the last day of class.