All courses / Landscape / Module 3 / Chapter 15
Learning objectives
After the lesson the participant can:
- Read a V2 view, distinguishing changes a trail shows from changes it cannot show.
- Explain drift with the controls left behind and decay of reversibility, and how each appears on a landscape.
- Apply the five questions of the quarterly routine to a year of change.
- Label a statement about the next year as observable, expected or speculation, with the reason.
Key concepts
- What a trail draws
- A trail is drawn for a change of column or row and for nothing else. A change of colour, size, shape, diamond, seat or baseline is shown as it stands at the later date and found by holding the later picture against the earlier one.
- Drift
- The drift of a unit between usage modes, from AI Governance, Chapter 2: a use moves from a prompt to a shared skill, a product, an automation, while the controls stay where the use started. On V2 it shows as a red outline at the end of a trail.
- Decay
- A mark whose row should have moved up and did not. No change event fires. It is caught only by a period of doing the work without the system, not a review of documents. The series illustrates the decay and does not measure it.
- An honest trail
- A trail is only as honest as the two measurements at its ends. If the question, the scale or the assessor changed between the dates, the line is partly an artefact. The model's timeline notes record who changed what and why.
- The quarterly routine
- Render V2 every quarter with the same start date, then ask five questions: what moved right and what travelled with it, what should have moved up, what changed colour, what is new or retired, and what changed that no trail can show.
Interactive exercises
Do them here and get feedback at once. Choose a card and then where it belongs, or drag it.
Interactive exercise 1 · Sort
What a trail shows
Sort the changes of the scenario year 2027 by how the landscape over time, V2, shows each of them.
Interactive exercise 2 · Scenario
A trail that ends in red
Read the situation and choose what the executive should conclude from the quarterly picture, using the chapter's five questions.
Teaching plan
| 10 min | Opening: the teacher shows Nordvik Region's V1 at the start and end of 2027 side by side and asks the room to find what moved before showing Figure 15.1. |
| 25 min | Lecture: the trail and its limits, a year in the data with Figure 15.2 and the break-in-series flag on the Netherlands, drift, decay with the two reversibility tests, and new and retired marks. |
| 10 min | Guided reading of Figure 15.3: Hansa Mutual's year with no trail, and its four timeline entries read as changes of seat and baseline. |
| 35 min | Exercise: participants draw a V2 for a year and answer the five questions on one page. |
| 10 min | Closing: participants label three statements about next year with one of the three labels and defend the label; the teacher uses the chapter's own examples. |
Discussion
- At Nordvik Region the controls of the rostering system arrive on 20 January and the level follows on 11 March. What would the picture have shown if the order had been reversed?
- The chapter says decay is the one movement the model cannot show unless somebody measures it. For a unit at R1 or R2 in your organisation, when was the work last done without the unit?
- Eleven marks at the start and thirteen at the end sounds like growth. What do the new and retired marks of Nordvik Region's year say when read by position and not by count?
Written exercise
Exercise · 35 minutes
A year on one page
Using the landscape you drew for your own organisation, or Nordvik Region's with the changes the chapter lists, choose a start date and an end date a year apart, or a quarter if your records are short. Draw the V2 by hand: a hollow outline, a thin line and a filled mark for each unit that changed column or row, a new tick, a hollow mark with a cross for each retirement, and the two dates in a strip. Then answer the five questions in order on one page. For each trail, tick, cross and changed seat, write the timeline note that names the decision behind it; where you cannot, mark the note as missing. Finally, write one statement about the coming year and label it observable, expected or speculation.
Deliverable: A hand-drawn V2 with two dates, a one-page answer to the five questions with a timeline note per change, and one labelled statement about the next year.
Self-test
Choose an answer to see whether it is right, or open the answer below each question.
Which of these changes during a year does a trail in V2 draw?
Show the answer
B. A unit moving from Level 2 Supervised to Level 3 Bounded
A trail is drawn for a change of column or row and for nothing else. Changes of seat, baseline, size, colour, shape or diamond are shown as they stand at the later date and are read against the earlier picture or in V4 and V5.The chapter labels one statement about the future as observable. Which one?
Show the answer
D. That the AI Act's obligations for Annex III high-risk uses apply from 2 December 2027
The date is in the adopted text of Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, so it is observable. The statements about the next survey, the pace and agents deciding benefit cases are each labelled speculation in the chapter.In the scenario, neither reversibility test fails outright. What does the chapter say follows for the two models?
Show the answer
A. In neither model does a row move; the finding sits in the conditions and the freezes
Both tests pass with conditions: Nordvik Region's supplier shift-swap feature stays frozen and Hansa Mutual's test freezes any extension beyond Germany. A test that fails outright is what moves a mark up a row.