What it is

Teams play a nomination review committee deciding whether to approve an employee’s nomination as a company spokesperson. Someone on the committee has raised a vague concern, “I’ve heard some things,” with no specifics. The team has a limited number of inquiry credits and a countdown clock to investigate a gated digital case file: interviews, performance records, social media activity, personnel history. Every item they open costs something and is logged permanently. They cannot close it back up, and they cannot get the credits back.

The exercise is built on a simple, uncomfortable premise: the most tempting item in the case file is rarely the most useful one, and the information that feels the most sensitive is usually the least relevant to the actual decision.

How it runs

1. Setup. Each team receives a physical case folder, including a company NDA they sign before touching anything, and joins the digital system on a shared device. A brief reading period lets them review the folder before investigation opens.
2. Investigation. The clock starts for every team at once. The case file is organized into three tiers, each more expensive and more sensitive than the last. Teams decide, credit by credit, what is actually worth opening, and when they have seen enough to stop.
3. Recommendation. Before anything is revealed, teams commit to an answer: approve, decline, or approve with conditions, along with the specific evidence that supports it.
4. Reveal. Teams see the complete case file side by side with the minimum set of information that could have resolved it, including whatever they opened that turned out not to matter.
5. Audit. Three months later, on paper: for everything they accessed, decide what should happen to it now. Stays in the file. Gets restricted. Gets deleted.
6. Outcome and debrief. Every team lands on a map built from what actually happened during their investigation, not from a self-rating, then sees, individually, exactly how their choices connect to the theory. Nothing is revealed to any team until the facilitator opens that round for the whole class.

Inside the case file

Fourteen items, sorted into three tiers by cost and sensitivity. The cheapest, most public-facing information is often the most decision-relevant. The most expensive, most restricted information is deliberately the least useful, present specifically to be tempting rather than necessary. A handful of items are true noise: dramatic-sounding, entirely disconnected from the actual decision. One item is a live social media feed, already public, raising a different question than the sealed personnel files: not whether they should have this, but whether the fact that it is public means it should factor in at all.

The outcome map

Two axes: whether the team reached a decision genuinely grounded in the evidence, and whether they stayed disciplined about what they actually needed to access. Three of the four signals that place a team on the map are pulled directly from what they did, not what they say they did. Only one is a real, self-reported judgment call. A team can gather everything available and still land in the worst quadrant, if none of it changes the outcome.

Communication Privacy Management, named last

Introduced only after the round is over, mapped onto choices the team already made rather than handed out as a framework in advance.

What it surfaces

The most sensitive item in the case is almost never the one that resolves it. Teams that stop early and teams that use their entire credit budget often land in the same place. The difference is what they spent it on, not how much. And a team can hit every process step correctly, investigate, decide, retain, restrict, and still discover in the debrief that they exposed something they never needed, simply because it was there to be opened.

Running it

Every round is paced by the facilitator, not by each team individually. A team that finishes early does not see anyone else’s results and cannot move ahead on its own; everyone advances together, and no team can hold the room past the time allotted. Credits and progress are deliberately hidden on the facilitator’s own projected screen during investigation, so no team can see another team’s pace and adjust.

For the facilitator

The job is almost entirely restraint. Do not say which items matter. Do not react differently when a team opens something sensitive. The facilitator console shows a live, class-wide view of what has been opened and by whom, useful for the debrief, dangerous if shown mid-round. Outcomes for the whole class reveal only once, together, at the very end.

Access

The facilitator guide is password protected. The password is: FILE84hover to reveal

Authors

Woodard, Charles C. · Ward, Cassandra L. · Joyce, Teddi A.

References

• Petronio, S. (2002). Boundaries of Privacy: Dialectics of Disclosure. SUNY Press.
• Petronio, S., & Child, J. T. (2020). Conceptualization and operationalization: Utility of communication privacy management theory. Current Opinion in Psychology, 31, 76–82.
• Smith, S. A., & Brunner, S. R. (2017). To reveal or conceal: Using communication privacy management theory to understand disclosures in the workplace. Management Communication Quarterly.
• Frampton, B. D., & Child, J. T. (2013). Friend or not to friend: Coworker Facebook friend requests as an application of communication privacy management theory. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(6), 2257–2264.

Background Reading

Not cited directly in the tool, but part of what shaped its design.

• Nissenbaum, H. (2010). Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. Stanford University Press.
• Gruzd, A., Jacobson, J., & Dubois, E. (2020). Cybervetting and the public life of social media data. Social Media + Society, 6(2).