The First Class

Offer the three products. “Here are three things most of us used this week. Pick one.” Take a show of hands and go with the winner.

Then: “Name a harm that went into making this. Who was harmed, and who fixed it?”

Write the answers on the board and keep them. You need the list in the next move.

Note. The list will come fast and stay shallow. Let it. That shallowness is the raw material for the next fifteen minutes, and correcting it now costs you the move.

The pivot of the session. Read the book's opening aloud:

In the 1990s, many major clothing brands pledged to eliminate child labor from their supply chains. They audited factories, terminated noncompliant suppliers, and published sustainability reports celebrating progress. Twenty years later, child labor persists—sometimes in the same regions, just pushed into smaller, less visible operations. Brands achieved compliance on paper while the underlying conditions that led to child labor (poverty, lack of education access, weak governance) remained unchanged or worsened.Chapter 2, opening

Then: “The brands audited. They terminated suppliers. They published reports. Twenty years on, the child labor is still there, only harder to see. So where did the harm go, and what was left structurally unchanged?”

Then, pointing at the board: “Take one item from our list. If the company fixed exactly that tomorrow, where would the harm move?”

Note. Expect pushback here from students with business backgrounds, and the Supplement's guidance holds: press them to name what was structurally unchanged. The more common wrong turn is moral rather than analytic, and the room starts arguing about whether the brand is bad or whether shoppers should buy differently. Chapter 2 answers that under structural causality, and reading the line aloud is the reset: systemic intelligence “examines why wages are too low for consumers to afford durable goods, why marketing manipulates insecurity, and how to restructure incentives throughout the system.”

Groups of four, one canvas each. State the substitution rule, then set three blocks and only three:

• 1 Map Your System. The challenge is already chosen: the harm the class named.
• 2 Expand Time Horizons. Six months, three years, ten, fifty.
• 4 Read System Signals. What is the system telling the company, and what would it do if it listened?

Skip blocks 5, 6 and 7. They ask for conversations the student would have to schedule, a premortem on a coming initiative, and a ninety-day practice. Those belong to someone running an enterprise, and asking students to invent answers teaches them to invent answers. Skip block 3 as well: its feedback loops are already inside block 1's sketch.

Note. Give a five-minute warning before you stop them. Block 1 absorbs whatever time it is given. If a group stalls on the causal-loop sketch, tell them to draw two arrows and move on; the diagram is not the deliverable.

Narrate this one. It is short, and it is the counter-case.

Then: “What did Interface change that our company did not?”

Note. You are steering toward this: Anderson changed what generated the harm instead of auditing for it afterward. If a student says the difference is that Anderson cared more, take it seriously and then test it. Caring produced the audits too.

Put Section C of the Roadmap on the screen. “You now run this company. Answer as them.”

Work the decision tree together. Question 1 asks for a primary role, and for most products the answer is “I build or run an enterprise.” Question 2A then offers four failures and routes the class to a single toolkit.

Then: “The tree gave you one toolkit. Defend it against the other three.”

Note. This is where the third objective is met and where the session stops being a discussion. Make them argue. The tree gives a first toolkit, not the only one: the Roadmap sends the reader back for a second, from a different dimension.