The Demand Engine · Curriculum

The Masterclass

Fifteen modules for your track, from working out what you would do this for to running it for someone else. Three on finding your path, five shared foundations, four for whichever track you are on, three advanced. Every module leaves you holding something. You do not pass one by attending it.

Weekly

One 75-minute session a week, never consecutive days.

Spacing near the measured optimum

3–4

Working pod size. Above six, participants go passive.

Roster 12 to 24

Whole

Every exercise produces a complete artifact in the participant's own words.

Never a template with blanks

Gated

Next week unlocks on submitting this week's artifact.

Resumption, not suspense

78%

Finish rate for those who complete something in week one, against 17% who do not.

Week one decides the cohort

Why it is built this way

Three decisions carry most of the difference, and all three are defensible in front of someone sceptical.

Weekly, not daily. The optimal gap between sessions is roughly 20% of how long you need the material to survive. For a method still in use ninety days later, that is nine to eighteen days. Three consecutive days is near-massed practice, close to the worst available spacing for retention, and it exists in the market to serve a cart close rather than a learner.

Whole artifacts, not worksheets. Producing a complete thing in your own words is worth roughly twice what filling in part of a template is worth, and the gap grows with time. Puzzle-style exercises test slightly negative. The branded fill-in-the-blank worksheet is the most professional-looking failure in corporate training.

The manager loop. Across 89 studies, supervisor support predicted training transfer at roughly twice the strength of peer support, which was the weakest environmental factor measured. Everyone builds a community channel. Almost nobody sends the two-paragraph brief to the participant's manager, and it is the strongest lever available.

The one number to instrument before any other. The percentage of session-one attendees who submit the week-one artifact. Everything downstream is a function of it, and it is the only figure here we will be able to state from our own data rather than borrowing someone else's.

The session, minute by minute

Same shape every week, so nobody has to learn the format. Nothing load-bearing after minute 55, because attention is gone by then.

0–8Retrieval, not recapCold questions about last week's artifact, answered before any teaching. In session one this slot is the pre-commitment instead.
8–25One mechanismRules, not scripts. One move per session and no more.
25–55Build in the roomPods of three or four. Each person produces a whole artifact in their own words.
55–68Show and critiqueTwo or three people show what they built. Feedback aimed at the artifact against stated criteria, never at the person.
68–75Written commitmentAn if-then intention, written live in the shared doc, naming a person and a date. Witnessed by the pod and asked about next week by a human.

One honest caveat on that last blockWhen plan-making prompts were scaled across 250,000 learners and 247 courses, the effect fell by an order of magnitude and did not move completion at all. The mechanism is real; the automated-email version of it does nothing. It has to be written live, seen by the group, and asked about the following week by a person. If you cannot do all three, cut the block rather than run a hollow version.

Running it

Cohort. Roster twelve to twenty-four, pods of three or four, one facilitator per twelve or so. Screen with an application and manager sign-off rather than a fee where you can, since it selects the same way and delivers the manager loop as a side effect.

Time cost. About two and a half hours a week: 75 minutes live plus roughly ninety minutes of your own work between sessions. Around nineteen hours of live time if you take the path modules, fifteen if you skip them. Above that you are competing with the day job; below it no artifact gets produced.

Where to start. If you already know what you are building, start at module 01. If you do not, start at 00 and take the three path modules first, because everything after them assumes you can name the thing. Then 01 through 05 in order, no skipping ahead because you feel advanced: the confident-wrong failure in module 01 is exactly the one experienced people make. Track modules need 01 to 05 behind them. Advanced modules need the track set.

How you know you finished one. Not by attending. Each module names what completion looks like, and it is always something you made plus a demonstration that it works. At 55 minutes the facilitator checks it against the stated criteria out loud, so the standard is public rather than private.

Before offering this to a clientRun it internally first, completely, with our own team producing real artifacts on real accounts. Module 12 covers selling it. Selling a programme we have not run would be precisely what we criticised in the teardown, and the client would be right to notice.