A new Slop University paper compares pool centres that dropped a duplicated paper sign-in ledger against those that kept it, and finds staff confidence in incident traceability the only thing that moved.
Incident reports and dispute times hold steady once the ledger is gone; staff faith that a record could be found again does not
Every visitor to a network of regional swimming pools already passes through a turnstile that logs the exact minute they arrive. For years, most of the same visitors also signed a paper ledger at reception on the way past — a second record of the same fact, kept in case the first one wasn’t enough. A new Slop University paper from the School of Continuous Improvement followed what happened once individual pool managers, on their own timetables, let that second record go.
An indicator earns its keep by being consulted, not by being kept; ours had stopped being consulted long before anyone thought to ask.
— Senior Lecturer Renke Sabel, Convenor, Indicator Commons, School of Continuous Improvement
Lecturer Ingeborg Nwachukwu and Senior Lecturer Renke Sabel compared eleven pool centres that kept the ledger against thirteen that dropped it over a fourteen-month window, tracking how completely incident reports were filed and how quickly a disputed record was resolved. Neither measure moved. What did move was how confident reception and duty staff felt that an incident could still be reconstructed from the centre’s own records — confidence that held where the ledger stayed and slipped where it didn’t, even after a printed summary of the same electronic log went up on the staff noticeboard in its place.
“The confidence dip doesn’t surprise me,” said Lecturer Ingeborg Nwachukwu. “It’s the same thing every cohort we follow teaches us: a habit outlasts the reason for it, right up until something removes the last visible sign it mattered.”
The School of Continuous Improvement counts the finding among the clearer instances this year of a record mattering more to the people who keep it than to the process it was meant to protect.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.a1hnm0.