What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Lectures#
The concepts, methods and worked case material behind each week’s session — what to read before class, and the reasoning tools you’ll be asked to apply to the Engagement Signal Pilot and, later, your own Alignment Lab record. Weeks with a slide deck link to it from their lecture page.
Week 1 lecture: Three kinds of claim
Why the whole course rests on telling fact from inference from unknown, and the full debrief of the Engagement Signal Pilot's opening timeline.
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Week 2 lecture: Invitation is not decision right
A taxonomy for reading who a meeting actually includes, and the full debrief of the Steering Committee's invite list.
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Week 3 lecture: Framing the table
The research behind agenda-setting effects, and a close read of the two Engagement Signal Pilot agenda drafts.
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Week 4 lecture: What 'stacking' actually means
Why no single document proves a decision was pre-made, and how a small set of documents together can still raise the burden of proof — read through two new documents from the pilot's own record.
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Week 5 lecture: Timing is a lever, not just a delay
Why when a document arrives can carry as much argument as what it says — read through a risk addendum that lands the night before a decision.
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Week 6 lecture: What minutes leave out
Silence in a meeting record is not the absence of a position — it can be one, or it can just be how minutes compress a meeting; read through the minutes of the 13 March working group and learn to tell the difference.
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Week 7 lecture: Power in the room
Whose suggestion reads as settled without a second thought, and whose gets worked hard for a hearing — read through a transcript of the meeting Weeks 4 and 6 have already shown you from the outside.
Week 7 · 5 April 2027
Week 8 lecture: Dissent without disappearing
What gets lost between a transcript and its minutes, and how to make a dissent hard to lose in the first place.
Week 8 · 12 April 2027
Week 9 lecture: Decision rights, leverage, and who actually has to agree
Four kinds of standing in a decision, and why "in the room" and "able to block the outcome" are not the same thing — the concept lecture behind this week's Alignment Lab role assignment.
Week 9 · 19 April 2027
Week 10 lecture: Minutes make memory
Why the written record of a decision, not the decision itself, is what everyone downstream actually inherits — revisiting Weeks 6 and 7's minutes and transcript from a new angle.
Week 10 · 26 April 2027
Week 11 lecture: The ethics of alignment
Two different questions that get collapsed into one — was the process fair, and was the outcome fair — and why a decision can pass one test and fail the other.
Week 11 · 3 May 2027
Week 12 lecture: Redesigning the decision
Bringing the semester's separate threads — invite lists, agendas, timing, minutes, leverage — together into criteria for a process worth trusting.
Week 12 · 10 May 2027