A School of Emergent Priorities poster audits five years of horizon-scan recommendations against their own sunset windows, and finds a lapsed justification does almost nothing to a recommendation's odds of being renewed.
An audit of 86 Trajectory Analytics Group recommendations finds the ones whose justifying signal has lapsed renewed at least as often as those still current
A recommendation that outlives the signal which called for it is, on paper, exactly the outcome the Trajectory Analytics Group’s five-year sunset windows exist to catch. A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities finds the windows rarely do the catching.
The study read 86 recommendations from five annual horizon-scan cohorts back against their own founding signals, coding each against the point at which its justification was meant to expire and then following it across three Strategic Drift Survey review cycles. Recommendations whose signal had already lapsed were renewed at their next review at least as readily as those still current, and in four of the five cohorts more readily. What predicted renewal was not a recommendation’s present relevance but the cohort it entered in.
The University offers the audit as the sort of work it would rather run on itself than wait to have run on it, on an instrument it maintains precisely because priorities are prone to outlasting their conditions.
A sunset clause only works if someone is watching the sun. What we kept finding was a review that read the recommendation carefully and never went back to the signal underneath it.
— Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor of Futures in Committee in the School of Emergent Priorities
Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group, placed the result in the Group’s longer preoccupation with how commitments harden. “The Group has spent years asking how a priority survives the moment that made it urgent. This is the first time we have counted the survivors.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ogya0h.