New findings from the School of Continuous Improvement compare initiatives paused from the Living Dashboard during a support period against matched initiatives that stayed visible, and find no measurable difference in recovery.
A staff survey finds recovery unchanged whether a struggling initiative stays on the Living Dashboard or is quietly paused
The number staff most wanted was never in the survey. They wanted to know whether being paused meant anything at all.
— Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory in the School of Continuous Improvement
New findings from the School of Continuous Improvement compare eighteen University initiatives — nine placed in Improvement-Holding Status, a practice that withdraws an initiative’s indicators from the Living Dashboard while it receives additional support, and nine matched initiatives that stayed visible throughout. Surveyed staff reported near-identical improvement in both groups by the time each initiative reached its next Review Cadence Observatory review.
The release marks the first time the University’s own governance practices, rather than its teaching or service systems, have supplied the subject of an internal study.
Staff were far from unified on what the pause is actually for. General staff mostly read it as a way of keeping a struggling initiative out of the reporting cycle; initiative leads mostly read the identical practice as protective.
“Both readings can be true of the same event, which is what makes it worth sitting with rather than resolving in either direction,” said Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities.
The School frames the finding as continuous with its broader work on what a measurement instrument comes to mean for the people it measures once its readings stop appearing in public.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.q39tzj.