Week 1: 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.
22 February 2027
Outline#
- why this distinction, not some other, is the course’s method: every later week — invitations, agendas, silence, minutes — is this same move applied to a different kind of document
- what makes an inference reasonable rather than merely plausible: it has to survive being stated next to the document it is drawn from
- the debrief: the agreed classification for the full ten-entry case timeline (below)
- what the course is not claiming: that every organisation hides its real decisions before the formal meeting, or that pre-meeting coordination is automatically improper — sometimes it produces a better-informed room, sometimes it produces a room with nothing left to decide, and the public record alone often cannot tell you which
- reading before Week 2: the Steering Committee’s invitation list for the 2021-03-08 meeting (distributed in the Week 2 session)
The debrief: the case timeline, classified#
| Date | Entry | Kind | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-01-18 | A Finance & Risk memo records the ClarityPulse budget figure, signed by Oyelaran | Fact | The memo states the amount and carries a signature |
| 2021-01-22 | Herrera meets ClarityPulse’s sales lead | Fact | Calendar entry only proves the meeting happened, nothing said in it |
| 2021-01-29 | Draft plan names LSS as first rollout site | Fact | The document directly names the site — that part is a fact. Why LSS was picked is a separate, unanswered question |
| 2021-02-01 to 2021-02-28 | LSS staff first hear “ClarityPulse” | Unknown | No dated document fixes when; informal staff recollection is not a documentary source, so the entry takes the month as a range rather than a false-precise single day |
| 2021-02-10 | Nandakumar’s email names a go-live term | Fact | Time-stamped and forwarded; whether the term was newly proposed or already fixed is separate |
| 2021-02-24 | Okoro requests an information session | Fact | Dated email exists; whether it was granted is a later, separate fact |
| 2021-03-01 | Draft B frames Item 4 as open | Fact | The file’s own metadata carries this date |
| 2021-03-03 | Draft A frames Item 4 as settled | Fact | This is the version actually sent |
| 2021-03-01 to 2021-03-03 | Someone decided the item should read as settled | Inference | No document names who or why, and no single document carries this claim’s date — it takes the gap’s date range rather than a false-precise day. See the worked example on the session page for the full reasoning, including the equally reasonable alternative reading |
| 2021-03-08 | Steering Committee confirms the timeline | Fact | Minutes are dated and attributed |
Two entries are marked “fact” that a first read often calls “inference” — 2021-02-10 and 2021-02-24. The document being dated and attributed is what makes the entry itself a fact; the further claim many readers add (“this proves the term was already decided,” “this proves the request was ignored”) is the inference, and it is a different sentence from the one in the table. Keeping those two sentences separate is the entire skill.
A little further reading#
The linked page is a practitioner resource list built around Argyris and Schön’s Ladder of Inference — the general idea that everyone climbs, mostly unconsciously, from observed data toward conclusions and then to action, adding assumptions at every rung. It’s useful here as a wider frame for why this skill is hard, not as a source for this course’s own terms: this course’s fact/inference/unknown test is narrower and more exacting than “which rung of the ladder is this” — an inference has to survive being stated next to the specific document it’s drawn from, not just be a plausible next rung up. Read it for one purpose: notice which rungs of the ladder correspond to what this course calls “inference” and which correspond to what it calls “unknown” — the ladder itself doesn’t draw that line, and blurring it is the most common way to under-mark your own classification of the timeline above.
Before Week 2#
Bring your classified timeline from the session. Week 2 adds who was invited to the meeting the timeline ends at, and who was not.
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — convenor