Week 12 Nap Lab: Defend the policy

The final session — you present your nap policy and it is argued against by someone playing the person who has to approve it

24 May 2027

The last session of the course. Nothing new is taught and nothing is submitted here — this is a rehearsal with an audience whose job is to find the weak joint before the marker does.

Before the lab#

Bring the four things, and note that the course has been assembling them since the break:

• the workplace map from week 7, with both columns filled in
• the two costings from week 8
• the named beneficiary from week 9
• a draft policy: who may rest, when, where, for how long, with what cover, and how anyone would know whether it worked

A draft you are unhappy with is fine and is in fact the useful case. A draft that does not exist cannot be improved by this session.

In the lab#

Five minutes each, in small groups. You present. Not the background — the policy. What changes on Monday, for whom, at what cost.

Then you are argued with, and the role is assigned. One person in the group plays the approver, drawn at random from a set: the cost objection, the fairness objection (“if they can, everyone will want to”), the appearances objection (“how does this look to clients”), and the precedent objection. You do not know which you are getting, because in practice you do not.

The one you could not answer. After each round, the presenter states which objection landed. This is the actual deliverable of the session. An unanswerable objection identified today is a paragraph in your defence; the same objection discovered by the marker is a hole.

Rewriting in the room, last twenty-five minutes. Time to change the draft while the objection is still fresh and the person who made it is sitting there. Use it. The most common regret reported in this session is having taken notes instead of editing.

Afterwards#

The Nap Policy Proposal is due at the end of this week. Submit the version that survived this afternoon, with the objection you could not fully answer named in the defence rather than hidden — a proposal that concedes a real limitation is more credible than one that pretends there is none, and markers can tell the difference immediately.

Twelve weeks ago the claim was that the nap is a biological need that modern work schedules erased. You have now measured it on yourself, traced how it was removed, seen what other arrangements permit, and written something that would put a little of it back. That last part is the only one anybody else will notice.