Performance Improvement Plan: Social Awareness
A thirty-day plan to improve your friend's social awareness. The incidents are dated. Dates are what separate a record from a grievance.
- Severity
- Concerning
- Date
- July 12, 2026
- Cost
- $
- Effort
- Moderate
- Forgiveness window
- 30 days, per the plan
Put your friend on a formal performance improvement plan for social awareness. Like every such plan, it opens by documenting the incidents that made it necessary, each one dated — dates are what separate a record from a grievance.
- March 8 — Explained the plot of a film to a person who had seen it, in front of two witnesses who confirmed she had seen it.
- April 2 — Responded to news of an engagement with an anecdote about parking.
- May 16 — Asked the table "you know what's interesting?" and was incorrect.
Then the timeline. Days 1–10: observation, no intervention. Day 10: first checkpoint, over coffee they'll believe is casual. Days 11–20: guided practice, including one structured group dinner with rotating speaking turns. Day 20: second checkpoint. Days 21–30: independent demonstration in a live social environment. Day 30: outcome meeting.
Success criteria: the subject reads the room. You provide the room. The plan closes with the standard line:
Signature indicates awareness of this plan, not agreement with it.
Support is available throughout. The support is you. It was always going to be you — the plan exists because you have no intention of going anywhere.
Make It Worse
- Require weekly self-assessments, submitted in writing
- Assign a mutual friend as accountability partner without consulting either of them
- Extend the plan on Day 30, citing incomplete data
- Close the plan with a laminated letter of successful completion, suitable for framing