Week 11 Session: Week 11: The Ethics of Alignment

What a fair process owes the people it is run on, examined through your own group's Alignment Lab retrospective.

3 May 2027

Before the session#

Your Alignment Lab submission — strategy memo, negotiation log, decision record, individual autopsy and partial rerun — is due today at noon, before this session runs, in full: the scored partial rerun is not something you do live in today’s session, it is part of what you hand in beforehand. Submit it first, then reread your group’s decision record as if you were a stranger to the process, using only what it actually says.

In the session#

This week asks a question the Lab’s process rules deliberately don’t answer for you: is a decision process fair because everyone had a formal turn to speak, or does fairness require something more — equal capacity to change the outcome, not just equal airtime? The Alignment Lab is explicit that it never grades on negotiation skill or role-goal achievement; this session is where the class discusses what, if anything, that design choice owes the role that structurally has the least leverage.

As a supplementary, ungraded exercise — distinct from the scored partial rerun you already submitted this morning — groups replay one contact decision differently as a group and discuss what, if anything, changes about the outcome or the record, the same move demonstrated in the Lab’s own worked example. This is a live discussion, not a second rerun to hand in; it exists so you can compare notes with people who ran a different change than the one in your own written rerun.

After the session#

Nothing further is due immediately. Hold onto today’s discussion, alongside the ethical reading this session practised — you will draw on both when the Decision System Redesign asks you to name what your own process cost the people with the least leverage in it.