A new study from the School of Emergent Priorities finds Horizon Register scan entries lose nearly all their hedging language by the time Futures in Committee minutes them, and that the entries left with no hedge at all advance through the Register's pipeline fastest.
Coding 96 Horizon Register entries against their committee minutes finds hedges vanish in translation, and the entries that lose every one advance fastest
A Horizon Register scan entry typically arrives hedged: a “may”, a “pending confirmation”, a qualifier marking where a school’s evidence runs out and its judgement begins. By the time Futures in Committee has minuted it, the hedge is usually gone.
Researchers coded 96 scan entries against their matched committee minutes across an eighteen-month window, checking two coders’ agreement on a quarter of the sample before one completed the rest. Hedges and open questions fell from a median of five per entry to none at all in seven minutes out of ten. Entries minuted with no hedge left advanced to the Register’s next stage in a third of the time entries with a surviving hedge took, and the pattern held regardless of how long the committee’s chair had held the role.
For the School of Emergent Priorities, the finding lands inside a question it keeps returning to: what a scanning process is actually recording, once the record has to fit inside a committee’s fixed slot for it.
A minute is supposed to be a record of what the Committee decided, not a cleaner version of what was scanned. We’re looking at whether those are still the same document by the time anyone reads it back.
— Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor of Futures in Committee
“Committees don’t set out to remove the hedge,” said Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities. “It’s just the first thing that doesn’t fit in the space a minute allows.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.bbdyys.