And they write it down
One fix per department, written in the channel. Not a feeling. A real change: photos earlier, a second proofer, a name on a shoot the day it shows up on ASB’s calendar.
01Three questions
Three questions. Everyone answers. Nobody skips.
Six checkpoints, six post-mortems. A post-mortem is a 15-minute look back on the Friday after each checkpoint, while you still remember what really happened.
- What did you finish this checkpoint?
- What fell behind, and when did you first know it would?
- What would you do differently on day one of the next cycle?
Question 2 is the most important one. Pages fall behind at the start, not the end. Almost every late spread was already late in week one, and the only person who knew was the person working on it.
It’s not a complaint sessionFifteen minutes, three questions, one written fix per department. If it turns into a list of who let you down, we stop.
Fifteen minutes, then it’s FridayIt’s not a checkpoint, and never will be. The pages are already in. This is how you keep what you learned.
Chairs go last
The mechanism
The next cycle starts by reading them
Workshop week starts by reading last checkpoint’s fixes out loud. That’s the whole reason we do this.A post-mortem nobody reads again doesn’t fix anything.
Real game and design studios do this too. If a team never talks about what went wrong, it happens again next month. By February it doesn’t feel like a pattern anymore.It just feels like bad luck.
02The six Fridays
The six Fridays
- After CP1Fri Oct 30
- After CP2Fri Nov 20
- After CP3Fri Dec 18 · last day of the semester, so this one is short
- After CP4Fri Jan 29 · the big one, because CP4 is the biggest stretch of the year
- After CP5Fri Feb 26
- After CP6Fri Mar 19 · the book is finished. This one looks back on the whole year
Making a mistake is fine.
Making the same one twice isn’t.