Exercises: Capstone
This chapter's exercises are different. There is no Part A recall section worth having, because nothing here is new — the recall for this chapter is the whole book.
What follows is the capstone, decomposed. Parts B and C are the work. Part D asks whether the method itself holds. Part M is a comprehensive review across all thirty-nine chapters. Part E is what you do afterwards.
Starred (★) problems have worked answers in appendices/answers-to-selected.md.
Part A — The Assembly
A.1 ★ List the ten sections of the production book and, for each, name the chapters that produced its contents.
A.2 Give the twelve completeness-audit questions. Which one must be asked by somebody else, and why?
A.3 ★ Give the six blocks of the ceremony-hour sheet and one item that belongs in each.
A.4 State the failure-injection method in six steps, and identify the step that is the actual test.
A.5 ★ Give the five-injection set in order, and say what each one tests.
A.6 Name the three defensible forms of a design decision, plus the fourth form that is honest and is not a defence.
A.7 ★ Give the absence test's five steps and its six questions.
A.8 What are the four rules of a simulated day, and what is its output?
A.9 ★ Give the nine sections of the post-event report. Which comes first and why?
A.10 Why must a defence be from the information available at the time?
Part B — Build It
B.1 ★ Assemble a complete production book for a real, reconstructed, or invented-with-real-constraints event. All ten sections. Report what you could not fill in.
B.2 Run the twelve-question completeness audit on it. Then have somebody else ask question 12.
B.3 ★ Build the ceremony-hour sheet for your event. One page, six blocks, every item naming a person or a time.
B.4 Write five injections for your event, sealed. They must be specific — a named thing, at a named time.
B.5 ★ Run injection 1, traced hour by hour, without solving until step 5. Record whether the book answered or you did.
B.6 Run injections 2 through 4. For each, record the gap and the fix, and check whether the fix collides with anything.
B.7 ★ Write the four-sentence category-D script for your event, using Chapter 28's four elements.
B.8 Defend eight decisions — four budget, four design — each in one sentence with a number or a principle and a chapter.
B.9 ★ Run the absence test. Give your book to somebody who was not involved. Write down every question, verbatim. Report how many there were.
B.10 Run the simulated day, in thirty-minute steps, with three sealed injections. Count and report the marks.
B.11 ★ Give every task assigned to a named non-professional a second name. Then check for collisions against the assignment sheet.
B.12 Write the post-event report, all nine sections — including section 1 first.
B.13 ★ Take the productive struggle's injection 6 and write your ten minutes for your own event, using your own documents.
B.14 Identify the three most fragile points in your plan. For each, say what would break it and what one sentence would close it.
Part C — Field and Practice
C.1 ★ Visit a real venue and complete section 04 of the production book from measurements, not from a website. Report what the website was wrong about.
C.2 Get three real caterer quotes for a specific date, guest count, and service style. Report the spread.
C.3 ★ Find somebody who has run events and ask them to spend ninety minutes on your absence test. Buy them lunch. Take notes and do not defend.
C.4 Ask a working planner what their production book contains. Compare to §40.1's ten sections and report what they have that this book does not.
C.5 ★ Ask a planner to describe a real failure they have had. Then check whether your five injections would have caught it.
C.6 Time yourself building the ceremony-hour sheet. Report the actual figure against the chapter's eleven minutes.
C.7 ★ Run one injection on somebody else's plan, with their permission. Report what it found and how they reacted.
Part D — Critique and Judgment
D.1 §40.3 says a read-through cannot find fragility. Is that fair to Chapter 26's method, or is it a false contrast?
D.2 ★ The five injections are all things this book has already prepared for. Design an injection the book genuinely cannot answer — and say what that reveals.
D.3 The absence test found eleven gaps in an excellent plan. Is eleven a lot or a little? What number would worry you?
D.4 ★ §40.5a says "the couple wanted it and it does no harm" is legitimate. Argue that this is a loophole through which any indefensible decision passes.
D.5 The productive struggle concludes that almost nothing in this book prepared you for injection 6. Is that an admission of failure, or is it correct about the limits of planning?
D.6 ★ The capstone requires roughly twelve hours plus somebody else's ninety minutes. Will anybody actually do it? If not, what is the minimum version that retains the value?
D.7 §40.4 says defending the outcome is not a defence. But outcomes are the only evidence anybody has. Work out what is actually being claimed.
D.8 ★ This chapter tests a plan. It does not test the planner. What would a test of the planner look like, and should this book have included one?
Part M — Comprehensive Review
These are the book's review questions. Each requires material from at least three chapters.
M.1 ★ (Ch.5, 14, 35) The guest count is the master variable in three domains. Name them, and give the mechanism in each.
M.2 (Ch.28, 30, 32, 34) Four errors in this book had the same form. Name all four, state the form, and give the four-word fix.
M.3 ★ (Ch.26, 28, 39) An audit finds contradictions. What can it not find, what can, and what is the third instrument?
M.4 (Ch.24, 27, 40) Trace Elena Reyes across the book. What was noticed, when, what was fixed, and what remained fragile until Chapter 40?
M.5 ★ (Ch.29, 30, 38) The disclosure problem appears three times with three different subjects. Name all three and the extra reason in each case.
M.6 (Ch.18, 22, 28) Follow the ★ 7:20 string-lights cue from its origin to its protection. Which three chapters, and what did each contribute?
M.7 ★ (Ch.6, 30, 37) A $42,000 budget, a $299.22 return, and a $10.18 hourly rate. Reconcile all three and say what each reveals that the others do not.
M.8 (Ch.21, 33, 39) "You are not the authority on anyone's tradition" generalises twice. To what, and what is the shared method?
M.9 ★ (Ch.27, 30, 31, 32) Going first appears four times, twice by people who are not planners. Name all four and state what each bought.
M.10 (Ch.11, 29, 34) Circulation appears at three scales. Give the rule at each and the failure mode at each.
M.11 ★ (Ch.2, 36, 37) Service levels become three different problems. Name them.
M.12 (Ch.12, 30, 38) Vendor management, the debrief, and marketing are the same activity. Explain, and give the uncomfortable corollary.
Part E — Extension and Synthesis
E.1 ★ Run the complete capstone on a real event you are planning. All eight project-checkpoint items. Report the total hours and the gaps found.
E.2 Take a published account of a real event failure and run it backwards: what injection would have found it, and at what point in planning?
E.3 ★ Write 800 words on whether a plan can be made robust to the absence of the planner, or whether some irreducible fraction is always in one head. Use §40.5's eleven questions as evidence.
E.4 Design a sixth injection type this chapter does not have. Justify why it belongs in the standard set.
E.5 ★ Build the completeness audit as a one-page checklist somebody else could apply to your book without you. Then have them do it.
E.6 Compare failure injection with how another industry tests plans — fire drills, chaos engineering, tabletop exercises, clinical simulation. Report two practices this chapter should adopt.
📐 The Capstone
This is the project. Everything else in this chapter serves it.
- The complete production book, ten sections
- The completeness audit, twelve questions, with question 12 asked by somebody else
- The ceremony-hour sheet
- Five sealed injections, run in order, gaps and collisions recorded
- The defence — eight decisions, one sentence each, a number or a principle and a chapter
- The absence test, with a real person and every question written down
- The simulated day, three sealed injections, marks counted
- The post-event report, nine sections, section 1 first
Twelve hours of yours and ninety minutes of somebody else's.
And the thing to measure at the end is not whether the plan is good.
It is how many times you answered from memory — because that number is the size of the part of this event that exists only in you, and it is the part that a fracture, a flight delay, or a bad Tuesday would take with it.