Week 12 Session: Week 12: Redesigning the Decision

Turning a semester of diagnosis into a process someone else could actually run — the course's final move, from reading decisions to redesigning one.

10 May 2027

Before the session#

Bring a first draft of the process you intend to redesign for the Decision System Redesign assessment. This is the last teaching session of the semester; the assessment itself is not due until two weeks from today.

In the session#

Every week so far has been a reading skill: naming what a document shows, what it omits, and what it argues for without saying so. This closing session turns that reading skill outward, into a design constraint. A redesign that only bans “talking before the meeting” fails immediately — informal coordination has legitimate uses, and pretending otherwise produces a process nobody actually follows. The session works through what a redesign has to specify to be runnable: who is invited, on what information, with what record, and what — if any — channel still exists for informal pre-meeting conversation.

Groups peer-review one another’s draft redesigns against a single test: could a person who was not in this room run this process from the document alone, and would it produce a traceable decision if they did?

After the session#

Submit your Decision System Redesign, tested against at least one concrete scenario, two weeks from today. This is the course’s final assessed piece of work, and there is no session in either of the two weeks before it is due.