Every round works the same way
Fifteen years, fifteen rounds, one procedure. The material changes each year; the sequence never does. Read this once and you will always know where you are and what is expected of you.
15 years · 2016–2030 · about 100 minutes per round
The eight beats of a round
- 1Scenario
- What happens
- You read what the year did to the world and to your company.
- You hand in
- Nothing.
- Done when
- You can say in one sentence what changed this year.
- 2Learn
- What happens
- You work through the lecture material and the design-thinking exercise for this year.
- You hand in
- Nothing.
- Done when
- You can name the mechanism, not only the headline.
- 3Investigate
- What happens
- You put the year's question to an AI tool and check what it tells you.
- You hand in
- Nothing.
- Done when
- You can name one thing the research changed your mind about.
- 4Debate
- What happens
- The design-thinking step: you argue in role, frame the question as “How might we…”, and name the option nobody offered.
- You hand in
- One saved position per available role, per required decision.
- Done when
- Every role that is present today has saved a position.
- 5Decide
- What happens
- You pick your portfolio, frame the question, and place a bet.
- You hand in
- Chosen options, a framing sentence, and one falsifiable prediction.
- Done when
- Every required decision has an option and you are inside the budget.
- 5bCurveball
- What happens
- One more decision on this year's list, from the start: two options, both cost you something.
- You hand in
- One curveball choice, with role positions like any other decision.
- Done when
- You have chosen, and your portfolio still fits the budget.
- 6Resolve
- What happens
- You see what your choice caused, including what earlier years set up.
- You hand in
- Nothing.
- Done when
- You can explain one number that moved and why.
- ★Takeaway
- What happens
- The year is reduced to the one thing worth carrying into a real job.
- You hand in
- Nothing.
- Done when
- You have read it. That is all this beat asks.
The questions everyone asks in the first session
- What is a curveball?
- Every year contains one unplanned demand, and it sits on your decision list from the moment the year opens, one more card among the rest. It has exactly two options, both of them cost you something, and one of them costs money you may already have allocated elsewhere. That is deliberate: real security work is mostly re-planning, and knowing the shape of a demand in advance does not tell you what it will actually ask for.
- Someone on our team is missing. Can we still play?
- Yes. Your teacher marks who is absent, and the round then only requires positions from the roles that are present. If the person who normally submits is absent, anyone present can submit instead. A team is never blocked by an empty chair.
- Where is the design thinking in this?
- In beats 2 and 4, and it is the spine of the whole course rather than a module. The lecture slides for most years carry a design-thinking exercise, and the Debate step is the cycle in miniature: frame the problem as a “How might we…” question, diverge by arguing it from six different roles, name the option nobody put on the list, then converge on a portfolio and place a falsifiable bet on it. The Resolve step is where that bet is tested.
- What does the quorum mean?
- Each required decision needs saved positions from at least half of the roles present, rounded up. Your teacher can switch this to full coverage, in which case every role present has to weigh in on every required decision.
- What happens when the clock runs out?
- If your teacher has set a closing time for a year, submissions are refused after it — on the server, not just in the interface. Anything you have chosen but not submitted stays in your browser, so a reopened window loses nothing.
- Can we change our mind after the curveball?
- Until you submit, yes, and that is usually the point. Paying for the curveball normally means reopening a decision you had already settled.
- Are the companies and incidents real?
- The four companies and their crises are fictional and marked as such. The regulations, threat patterns and cited cases around them are real and carry sources you can open.
You do not need to memorise this. The same three lines — what happens, what you hand in, when you are done — sit at the top of every step for all fifteen years.