A School of Emergent Priorities paper surveys Master of Priority Studies alumni and finds a capstone panel's priority rank has no association with implementation, while a pre-existing budget line predicts it in the overwhelming majority of cases.
A survey of Master of Priority Studies alumni finds a capstone panel's priority rank has no bearing on whether a recommendation was implemented; a pre-existing budget line does, overwhelmingly
Every cohort of the Master of Priority Studies ends the same way: a capstone pitch, a five-tier priority rank from the sponsoring panel, and a recommendation released into the University to make of what it will. A new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities asked alumni what became of that rank once the room emptied.
Dr Ingrid Vasseur and Professor Verity Marris surveyed 151 alumni from six capstone cohorts, a 67 percent response among those the program could still reach, and set each recommendation’s panel tier against whether the sponsoring unit already held a matching budget line at the time of the pitch. Tier carried no detectable relationship to whether a recommendation was later implemented; a pre-existing budget line did, closely, with implementation running to roughly three in four recommendations pitched against an existing line and about one in four without.
The School counts its own capstone panel among the instruments it studies, and holds its ranking to the same account it asks of every horizon-scan recommendation the School puts its name to.
A panel ranking gives a room something to agree on before it disperses. What our alumni keep telling us is that the agreement in the room was never the thing that moved afterwards.
— Dr Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor of Futures in Committee
“The rank was never wrong, exactly,” said Professor Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group. “It just wasn’t answering the question everyone assumed it was.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.aaxt6q.