Week 8 Autopsy: Service failure, reconstructed
Week 8 — cross-referencing multiple reviewers' accounts to reconstruct a consistent timeline of what actually went wrong in the room.
14 September 2026
Before the session#
Find at least two reviews, ideally from different periods, that describe the same kind of service problem — slow tables, a specific staffing gap, an ownership change reviewers noticed before it was announced. One account is an anecdote; two independent ones start to be a pattern.
In the session#
Desmond treats this like witness cross-referencing: where accounts agree, where they conflict, and what a conflict tells you (two people at the same table rarely disagree about whether food arrived — they do disagree about whether it was worth the wait). You reconstruct your specimen’s service timeline as a group exercise before doing your own.
Afterwards#
A service-failure timeline built from more than one witness, ready to sit alongside the location, menu and review-history findings — and one more place a lazy single-cause story might not survive contact with the evidence.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- at least two independent accounts of the same service problem
- a reconstructed timeline that doesn't rely on any single witness alone
Teaching team
- Desmond Achebe — tutor