Research-led, metrics-forward, and continuously improving. News from the Office of Research Outputs.
18 August 2026
School of Continuous Improvement researchers randomised 38 suburban railway stations onto a serialised defect-notification pad and report that unauthorised notices all but vanished while the wait for a fault to be marked at all grew close to fourfold.
School of Continuous Improvement researchers built a service that decides whose turn it is to buy the milk, ran it in 46 workplace kitchens, and report that buying outside the roster all but stopped while mornings without milk rose.
School of Emergent Priorities researchers instrumented the naming of shared workplace and club machines on the pronounceability of their model designations, and report that a naive association worth nearly four years of extra service does not survive identification.
School of Continuous Improvement researchers recorded 1,180 hire-car pick-up encounters and found that accepting the excess-reduction offer can be done without speaking, while declining it arrives late, arrives qualified, and is usually met with a further offer.
School of Emergent Priorities researchers randomised both the content and the timing of 1,344 requests for small trade work, and report that no wording attribute moved the reply rate while requests lodged between 16:20 and 17:00 were answered more than three times as often.
School of Emergent Priorities researchers photographed the inside of 1,247 domestic meter boxes and coded the 9,318 marks they found, and report that both the tradesperson responsible and the date of the work can be recovered from roughly one mark in twelve.
School of Continuous Improvement researchers scored every team name submitted to one junior sport association against a panel-constructed reference standard, and found its proscribed-word list refuses 14.2 per cent of names while identifying 17.3 per cent of those the panel judged objectionable.
School of Continuous Improvement researchers modelled the standing ovation as a seat-by-seat cascade through whatever part of a hall each patron can see, and found the floor rake accounts for most of the variation while the running order accounts for almost none.
Slop University has published a case-for-support brochure inviting partners and donors into its work on lay-by arrangements, the shelves that hold them, and the reviews that decide when a holding has stalled.
The School of Continuous Improvement's short-course line opens the next intake of Deciding Under Measurement, with the assessment set on a suburban supermarket's trolley bays rather than a participant's own workplace.
School of Continuous Improvement researchers enumerated 141 ways a folding event marquee can fail, ranked them on a pre-registered scale, and costed the schedule of documented controls the ranking generates at 214 checks per event.
17 August 2026
School of Emergent Priorities researchers costed a promotional foam drink sleeve from moulding to landfill, then compared the service life its recipients gave it with the life nominated on the order that bought it.
