The Handshake
Building trust across adversarial history
South Africa, 1993. Apartheid is ending but the country isn't saved yet. You're at the constitutional table where former enemies must build trust from nothing — because the alternative is a civil war that nobody survives.
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Part of this story
The Handshake
→South Africa, 1993. The apartheid state is ending. The constitutional negotiations at Kempton Park are the only thing between a democratic election and civil war. You are the ANC legal adviser. The deal requires trust between people with no reason to trust each other.
Part of the quest
Decisions That Shaped the World
→Five moments that changed history. The Cuban Missile Crisis, Gandhi's Salt March, the Berlin Airlift, Mandela's negotiation table, the Marshall Plan pitch. Each one was a decision made by a person under pressure. Practice the skills those decisions required.
What you'll learn from The Handshake
This scenario focuses on Building trust across adversarial history — a critical skill inside the broader history domain. You'll face a decision where the instinctive response is often the wrong one. After you make your choice, you'll see exactly what happened in the other person's head and why it mattered. The scenario is part of The Handshake, a full interactive story inside the Decisions That Shaped the World quest.
Skills you'll build in Decisions That Shaped the World
More scenarios in this quest
What started with the handshake just got more complicated. Now you need to understand how groupthink leads intelligent people to catastrophic choices — and the situation is shifting faster than your first approach can handle.
This is the moment you've been building toward. Choosing between two options that both carry serious costs — except now the stakes are real and there's no rehearsal. What you do next matters.
You've faced the hardest part. Now turn what you've learned into something sustainable — a way to understand how groupthink leads intelligent people to catastrophic choices not just today, but every time this situation returns.
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