A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement tests a Directly Responsible Individual placard scheme on meeting-room marker caddies, finding it changed staff confidence in restocking far more than it changed whether the caddy was actually stocked.
A term-long trial across 60 meeting rooms found stocked-rate tracked cupboard distance, not the placard on the wall
Facilities’ meeting-room whiteboards share a problem no booking system tracks: the marker caddy fixed beside them, found dry as often as not. The Adaptive Metrics Lab’s fix follows an old institutional instinct — put a name on it. A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement checked whether the name did anything the caddy could feel.
A name on a wall doesn’t restock anything by itself. What it changes is how safe everyone feels not checking.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab
Associate Professor Beng, Dr Joost Nwosu, and Dr Mirela Hanke paired 60 meeting rooms across two Schools’ buildings and gave half of each pair a laminated placard naming the caddy’s Directly Responsible Individual, auditing every caddy weekly for a full term. Labelled and unlabelled caddies came back adequately stocked at statistically indistinguishable rates throughout; a caddy’s distance from the nearest stationery cupboard predicted its fate far better than its placard did.
“A placard is just an indicator with a face on it,” said Dr Renke Sabel, who was not involved in the study but works alongside its authors in the School’s evaluation-ecosystem agenda. “We’ve learned not to be surprised when one outlives whatever it was meant to change.”
An end-of-term survey found the placard’s named individual went largely unrecognised even in labelled rooms, yet those same respondents reported far more confidence a depleted caddy would be restocked than staff in unlabelled rooms. The finding joins the School’s broader case that a governance signal and the behaviour it produces are worth measuring separately — a distinction the Lab’s own custodianship work, funded under the Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund, was already built to draw.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.3av1kp.