The School of Emergent Priorities has opened this year's fielding window for the Strategic Drift Survey, the instrument that tracks how far enacted priorities drift from the ones committees signed off on.
The annual instrument comparing stated and enacted priorities returns for another fielding round, with Dr Petra Umbile again on its design team
The School of Emergent Priorities has opened the fielding window for this year’s Strategic Drift Survey, the annual instrument that sets a year’s stated priorities against a running record of where its committees, panels, and working groups actually spent their time.
Dr Petra Umbile, the survey’s longest-serving design-team member, carries this round through the instrument’s now-familiar two-stage design: a document pass across the year’s strategy and planning artefacts, paired with an agenda log kept across every sitting body the School convenes. The University counts the comparison among its more candid annual habits, the sort that keeps a strategy honest about the distance between what it commits to on paper and what it finds time to act on.
A priority survives a planning cycle by being written down. Staying on an agenda afterwards is a separate and much harder trick, and that gap is what the Survey has always been built to watch.
— Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Ingrid Vasseur, who convenes the School’s Futures in Committee seminar series, welcomed the round’s return, saying it “gives the committee side of the picture its own proper instrument, instead of leaving it to whoever still remembers last year’s agenda.” Fielding continues across the current teaching period, with results feeding into the School’s year-end account of its own drift.