Lab Guide — Build a Verification & Comms Plan

Facilitated exercise · 40 minutes · Fictional urgent wire request

What this lab is

Your group builds a communications and verification plan for a fictional urgent wire-transfer request that arrives by voice call. You will produce a PACE plan and a verification rule you could put into practice immediately. Nothing here involves real money or accounts.

The inject

The call

A principal receives a call. The voice is unmistakably their CFO's. The CFO says a time-critical acquisition deposit must go out in the next twenty minutes or the deal collapses, and asks the principal to authorise it now. The CFO is "about to board a flight" and cannot take a callback.

Part A — Spot the pressure (10 min)

Deconstruct the attack

List every manufactured-urgency and authority cue in the inject.
Why is "the CFO can't take a callback" the tell, not the obstacle?

Part B — The verification rule (15 min)

Write it

State the rule: what the principal does instead of acting on the call.
Name the independent channel and the pre-agreed challenge.
Decide what happens if verification cannot be completed in time.

Part C — PACE (15 min)

Plan the channels

Build a Primary / Alternate / Contingency / Emergency plan for the principal↔CFO relationship, ensuring at least one channel is independent enough to serve as the verification route.

✓ Self-check: your rule refuses to act on the arrival channel, uses an independent callback plus a shared secret, and has a safe default (do not send) when verification fails — and your PACE plan provides that independent channel.