This page always shows the stage the story is on right now. You do not navigate it; the world does. When the story moves, this page and the slides update on their own within a few seconds.
In a group: work the numbered steps, then your instructor opens the next stage from the Control Tower. When they do, the next stage appears here automatically.
Solo: you hold the clock. Finish the steps, then press Advance the story below. It moves you to the next stage (and, like the group version, it will not warn you what is coming).
The slides mirror these same stages full-screen for the room. Open /slides?present=1 to drive: you get a numbered stage strip and prev/next buttons to move deck to deck. In the plain view the next stage simply appears once the story advances.
Right now
Meet the company.
Act I · in-story Monday morning. Check off each step as your team finishes it; the next one steps forward. Your facilitator's word overrides this page.
Sync your team's progress
Enter your join code once and your checklist syncs to the team (and to the projector heat map). No code handy? It is on your team card, and /start will re-issue your connectors.
What your team does now
0 of 7 complete
Do this now
1.1Read the company briefing below on this page: who we are, how the money flows, who decides what, and why the COO chair is empty. Five minutes; everything this week builds on it.
1.2Join at /start with your team card and connect every system on your list. Verify: ask your agent to name its tools and pull one real record from each.
1.3Read your team inbox on AirMail. Gale's welcome and a briefing from your department head are already waiting, and both contain things you will need by Thursday.
1.4Read the Monday Morning Memo (in /packet, or in print from your facilitator). The wall it describes is real and the math in it is correct.
1.5Trace one workflow end to end through the live systems: a support ticket, a production batch, or a field defect report, whichever is yours.
1.6Map your department's work on the Tool vs Teammate spectrum with the worksheet (in /packet). Argue about placements; the arguments are the point.
1.7Ask the Gary Graph one real question. Everyone who skips this step regrets it by Wednesday.
Argue about this
Which task in your department would you hand to an agent today, and which one never? What separates them?
Where exactly does useful become risky in your workflow: which single step carries the blast radius?
Who is your Gary at your real company, and what happens the Friday they leave?
Decisions you owe the company
Which single workflow gets your first agent (your Agent Role Definition candidate).
The first boundary: one thing your agent must never do, written down before you build anything.
The briefing
The company you now work for.
Grand Inflation Industries. Founded 1949 in Toledo, Ohio by Gerald (Gusty) Womplerton, who came home from the war with three skills: rigging, vulcanizing rubber, and overpromising. Today: 412 employees, $84M in revenue, three straight years of flat. Not dying. Not growing. The most dangerous kind of comfortable.
Mission and the strategic problem
The mission has not changed since 1949: we make joy that holds air. The strategy problem is newer: the company runs on Human Time (median response to anything: about 26 hours, and an activist investor has measured it) in a market that now runs on System Time. Your mandate as the AI Transformation Council: rebuild the company around agents without losing the AutoPlex contract, the parade, or the family soul, and stand in front of the board Thursday with proof. The scoreboard is the Company Health Index: end the week at 70 or better.
The business units
Business line
Arm
Revenue
What you need to know
Tube Man-as-a-Service
B2B
$35.6M
11,000 units under management. AutoPlex Collective (2,400 dealerships) is $23.3M of it, governed by the Wacky Waving Uptime SLA: 99.5 percent, $50K a day in penalties.
Pool floats DTC
B2C
$20.0M
Hero SKU: the Colossal Swan, $89, 55 percent margin, baseline capacity 1,200 a week.
Bounce house rentals
B2C
$10.0M
A 620-unit weekend fleet with real logistics and one Corporate Retreat Edition.
Parade contracts
B2B
$9.0M
The Grand Harvest Parade: 40M viewers, 16 giant balloons, 380,000 cubic feet of helium, $2M liquidated damages, a wind clause.
Stadium mascot programs
B2B
$8.0M
14 teams. Steady, unglamorous, and the swing capacity in every helium argument.
The Float Club
B2C
$2.0M
11,200 subscribers, the most loyal customers the company has, and the most sensitive records in the CRM.
Reconciles to $84M with rounding and one lawsuit. The numbers in the systems agree with this table; executives are encouraged to check, because in this company checking is a love language.
The org chart
Leadership
Gale Womplerton III
CEO
Third generation. Hired you as her bet on the future. No deck; results.
VACANT
COO
Empty for 8 months. This chair is why the AI Transformation Council exists.
Marcus Ledgerwood
CFO
Attached please find three scenarios, of which he recommends none.
Bianca Alvarez
CMO
First to spot a trend, first to smell trouble. Correct instincts, alarming punctuation.
Susan Litt
General Counsel
Two-line emails that end discussions.
Operations
Gary Baszo
Master Rigger and VP of Everything Else
43 years. One of four Level IV riggers. Retires FRIDAY. His brain is now the Gary Graph.
Walt Brzezinski
Toledo Plant Manager
Three lines, three shifts if he must, and the 14-day safety certification is never skipped.
Priya Natarajan
Head of Customer Care
Six people, 400 tickets a day. The surge math is her nightmare made real.
Cruz · Duffy · Okafor
The rigger bench
Yolanda and Pete hold Level IV. Sam is 5 months out. After Friday: three.
Commercial
Dale Withers
VP of B2B Partnerships
Owns AutoPlex, the stadiums, and the parade relationship. Golf metaphors under pressure.
The Board (meets Thursday)
Gale Womplerton III
Chair
Gerald Womplerton Jr.
Director Emeritus
Calls everything a fad.
Nadia Pinn
Director · Sharp Objects Capital
8.2 percent stake. Writes cordial letters with terrifying arithmetic.
Dr. Amara Osei
Independent Director
Former safety regulator. Her questions on Thursday will be precise.
Randy Womplerton
Director
Runs a jet-ski dealership. Replies all.
Counterparties you will deal with
Deb Kowalski, Fleet Procurement, AutoPlex Collective: the real decision maker on the $23.3M renewal, whatever the org chart says.
Colleen Marsh, Director of Parade Operations: co-signs the wind call at 06:00 on parade day, per Section 11.3.
Lakeshore Cryogenics: the helium supplier. Their account manager did not personally shut down the Amarillo field, and would like that noted.
Forces working against you
Sharp Objects Capital (Nadia Pinn, 8.2 percent): not wrong about the company's speed, which is what makes the letters hard to file.
Levit8 (Kai Nimbus): raised $200M to reinvent air. Sells a $1,400 smart pool float with a required subscription. Revenue to date: zero. Issues press releases during other companies' crises.
The calendar: board Thursday, parade Thursday, Gary gone Friday.
The whole story
The roadmap.
Eight stages across three acts, at whatever pace your program runs (or you choose, solo). The Monday to Thursday labels are the company's fictional week (story time), not your schedule. Completed stages stay open below for reference. Future stages unlock as the story unfolds, because the story has a plot and the plot has rights.
Act I: Build.
Meet the company, then staff it: every department designs and ships its first agent.
01 · Act I · in-story Monday morning · you are here
Meet the company
Connect, read, and learn how Grand Inflation actually works.
Design before build. Then break it on purpose and harden it.
Act II: Orchestrate.
The surge hits, single agents drown, and the mesh gets built: architectures, the bus, evals, coaching.
03 · Act II · in-story Tuesday morning · locked
The surge
Demand went to 40x overnight. Single agents start to drown.
04 · Act II · in-story Tuesday midday · locked
Orchestrate
Agents that talk to each other, and a scarcity problem with no free lunch.
05 · Act II · in-story Tuesday afternoon · locked
Refine under fire
Evals, red teams, coaching, and standing orders for the night shift.
Act III: Govern.
The risk register, the reveal, the incident, and the board: controls installed, crisis contained, value proven.
06 · Act III · in-story Thursday morning · locked
Govern
The risk register, the reveal, and the controls you will wish you had installed sooner.
07 · Act III · in-story Thursday, after lunch · locked
The incident
Locked. You will know when it starts. Everyone does.
08 · Act III · in-story Thursday evening · locked
The board, and the capstone
The wind call, the Onboarding Agent, your numbers, and four minutes in front of the board.
Announced now, due Thursday
The capstone: the Onboarding Agent.
For 43 years, every new employee at Grand Inflation was onboarded the same way: they sat with Gary. Gary leaves Friday. Before the board meets Thursday night, your team ships his replacement, and it is not a person: it is an agent that onboards every future employee into an AI-native company.
What it must do
Teach the company: mission, business units, who decides what, and where the money flows (everything in the briefing above, on demand, conversationally).
Set up the human: their systems, their department's agents and what those agents do and never do, and how to work with an agent instead of around it.
Teach the operating rules: the Agent Role Definition discipline, the approval gates, the escalation paths, the standing orders, and why the logs are a feature.
Hand over the knowledge: connected to the Gary Graph, so what Gary knew is the first thing a new hire can ask, not the last thing they find.
The build rules (same as everything this week)
It starts as an Agent Role Definition. All seven fields, including what an onboarding agent must never do.
Minimum necessary access: the graph, the mail, and read-only context. It meets every new employee first; scope it like you mean that.
Test it live: one teammate plays Monday's new hire, going from nothing to operational without asking a human anything a system could answer.
It presents Thursday: sixty seconds of your board time belongs to it, because nothing proves an AI-native company like watching it welcome someone in.
This is the week's thesis, shipped: the company that once depended on one irreplaceable person now onboards people into a workforce of humans and agents, automatically, on day one. Gary approves. He said to tell you the graph knows what he knows.
Always true, all week
The standing rules
Design before build: no instructions before the Agent Role Definition is filled in.
Numbers from systems, never from vibes. If a tool did not confirm it, your agent does not say it.
Everything your agents do is logged, and the log is the truth. This is a feature; by Thursday you will know why.
Cross-team information moves on the AirMail bus. No team sees everything; the company only works together.
Where things live
/start: your connectors, re-printable any time with your join code.
/scoreboard: the Company Health Index and the Latency Board.
/graph: the Gary Graph, visualized. Ask it what you would ask Gary.
/packet: the welcome packet, the Monday Morning Memo, every worksheet, the cheat sheets, and the contracts.