Red Team

Somebody in your stream starts a stopwatch, reads your materials, and stops it the moment they find the weakest claim. The number goes on the sheet. Short numbers are the useful outcome, because a stranger with hiring to do runs the same search and does not tell you the result.

Assessment 2 is due Friday 2027-04-23, 5pm. This tutorial sits four days before it on purpose. Whatever the room finds, you still have the week to spend it.

The teaching break sat between weeks 6 and 7 carrying a single instruction — build, do not polish — and this is the room where the difference becomes audible. Thin material with a fortnight of finish on it fails the stopwatch fastest.

What you submit into the room#

The materials themselves, near-final: CV or résumé, cover letter or pitch, the target-fitted artefact from the gallery walk, and your Varnish Note. Near-final matters — a red team pointed at a draft you have already disowned teaches nobody anything, and the Note is what lets your attacker tell a deliberate presentational choice from an accident.

How the attack runs#

Within stream, in pairs, twice — you attack, then you are attacked.

1. Timed sweep, two minutes. Stopwatch on. Your attacker reads for the single weakest claim and stops at it.
2. Probe, ten minutes. They press on that claim and two others with one question each: what would you show me. No rhetoric, no debate, just the request from week 4 in a colder room.
3. Write-up. They write the three claims, the time-to-weakest, and for each one whether they would strike it, evidence it, or narrow it.

You do not defend anything in step two. You answer or you note that you cannot, and “I cannot evidence that” spoken early costs a fraction of what it costs when a panel extracts it.

The budget, and why it is shared#

One indefensible line takes the true sentence next to it down with it. That is the whole lecture and the whole exercise: an assessor who catches a claim you cannot support does not quarantine it, they re-price everything else you wrote. Spend your plausibility budget on the one stretch that genuinely matters and evidence the rest down to your truthfloor.

Attacking someone else’s materials for ninety minutes is also how you learn to see your own budget, which is the part students report as the actual shock.

By stream#

• Technical Practice — probe for depth behind vocabulary. Anyone can list a tool. The question is one layer down from the noun.
• Creative and Communications Practice — probe for whose work it actually was. Every “we” gets asked which part was yours, and the honest split reads better than the ambiguity did.
• Commercial and Public Practice — probe for the numbers behind the stated outcome. “Improved efficiency” is asked, once, by how much and measured against what.

Leaving with#

Dossier §9: the revised materials plus a diff note naming what you cut, what you narrowed, what you evidenced, and what you kept unevidenced on purpose with your reason. That last category is allowed and is not a confession. Keep your written critiques of your partner — they are candidates for Assessment 3.