The School of Continuous Improvement's seminar series returns this teaching period with a session on indicators that keep reporting after their target has moved.
Associate Professor Casimir Beng leads the School of Continuous Improvement's seminar series into a session on metrics that outlast the process they were built to track
Improvement Grand Rounds, the School of Continuous Improvement’s standing seminar series, resumes this teaching period with a session pointed at the School’s own instrumentation. Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, opens proceedings with a talk on the indicator that keeps reporting a trend long after the process it was built to track has already changed shape.
The talk draws on the Lab’s ongoing work translating operational metrics into governance signals, tracing what happens between the moment a measure is adopted and the point, sometimes years later, when someone finally asks what it is still standing in for. Associate Professor Beng’s session takes the Adaptive Metrics Lab’s own dashboards as its first case study, on the view that a school studying measurement owes its audience an accounting of its own.
Every instrument we run started as a proxy for something we cared about more directly. The interesting failures happen quietly, well after everyone has stopped checking whether the proxy still points the same way.
— Associate Professor Beng
The University regards Grand Rounds as one of the clearest windows onto how the School holds itself to its own standard, and this session continues that habit in public. Session timing and room details will be circulated to the School closer to the date.