Week 11 Lab: Workplace Behavior

A Lab drafting and redrafting one piece of professional correspondence

Before the Lab#

Bring one real piece of professional correspondence you need to send this week, or a plausible scenario if you don’t have one.

In the Lab#

Introduction. Last week’s constraint was a dollar figure carved out of an income. This week’s constraint is a sentence count carved out of an email — the same discipline of deciding what actually has to survive the cut.

Activity 1 (pairs, 15 min): Mock interview. Ask one other student these five questions, in order, then swap:

1. Tell us about yourself.
2. Describe a time you disagreed with someone on a group project. What happened?
3. Why does this role interest you?
4. What’s something you’re still working on improving?
5. Where do you want to be in a few years?

Feedback is limited to one thing that worked and one specific fix — not a general critique.

Presentation: Share out, as a class, the one fix that came up in the most pairs — which question is everyone rambling on?

Activity 2 (groups of 4): The shrink-down. Each group gets the email below and has to cut it to three sentences without losing the actual request.

The email was sent at 11:52pm on a Sunday to a group of five, forwarded within the hour by three separate recipients to the other two with no comment attached beyond “thoughts?”, and is reproduced below in full, unedited, exactly as it landed in all five inboxes at once.

Hi team,

Hope you’re all doing well! Just wanted to reach out and touch base about a few things. So I’ve been thinking a lot about the project timeline, and I know we all discussed this a bit last week, but I wanted to circle back and get everyone’s thoughts again since things have kind of shifted a little since then. There’s a lot going on this week for me personally so I might be a bit slow to respond to things, just a heads up. Anyway, the main thing is I think we might need an extra day for the deadline, or maybe two, not totally sure yet, still figuring that out. Let me know what you all think when you get a chance, no rush though! Also random thought but should we get lunch sometime this week? Anyway let me know about the deadline thing.

Thanks so much, [Name]

Shortest version that keeps the actual ask — more time is needed, roughly how much, and a request for a response — wins.

Discussion / debrief: Winning version goes on the board.

Wrap-up. Now apply the same cut to the correspondence you brought. Draft it, put it down, and redraft it at least once against this week’s case study: cut the blame, cut the apology, state the situation and the fix in one paragraph.

Afterwards#

Send the final draft if it was real, or file it for when the situation comes up.