New findings from the School of Emergent Priorities show that the Strategic Drift Survey's newly added second layer tracks how much a unit writes, not how far its priorities have moved.
A second self-assessment layer, added after the first stopped finding drift, tracks how much units write rather than what they've changed
The Strategic Drift Survey exists to measure the gap between what Slop University says its priorities are and what it actually funds, staffs, and schedules. Sometime in late 2025, that gap appeared to close. The School of Emergent Priorities’ response was not to trust the reading, but to add a second layer underneath it.
Researchers re-scored twenty-four units’ second-layer submissions for length, hedging, and how thoroughly each described its own drift, then repeated the exercise with elaboration held constant across a matched subsample. Response length tracked the layer’s own drift score closely; almost nothing else did, and the association didn’t survive once wording was controlled for.
The result leaves the School with an instrument audited twice over, and no closer to a number it can act on.
We built the second layer to find out whether the first layer’s silence meant the drift had actually stopped. What it found out is closer to what we already knew about how the first layer worked, applied one level up.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities
“An instrument that stops finding what it was built to find is usually a candidate for retirement, not a second layer,” said Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer in the School of Continuous Improvement. “I understand why the layer went in. I’d still like an answer to the question it was added instead of asking.”
A third layer, designed to correct the second layer’s elaboration bias, is already in scoping.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.4v9cxa.