A new Slop University paper interviews admail distributors and parcel couriers about what a "no junk mail" sticker actually changes, and finds a council's compliance register tracking something else entirely.
Interviews with 48 delivery workers find a council's compliance register holding near-ceiling while what happens at the letterbox moves on its own
A “no junk mail” sticker enters a council’s compliance register the day it goes up, and from that point the register has one job: report whether the address is still sorted. A new Slop University paper puts that single figure alongside the people who actually decide what lands in the box, interviewing 48 admail distributors and parcel couriers across six suburbs and setting their accounts against ten months of the council’s own audit rounds. The two rarely move together.
The findings sit inside the School of Continuous Improvement’s wider work on what a stable indicator can and cannot be taken to show — an agenda the School treats as unfinished by design.
A register that hasn’t moved in ten months isn’t proof that nothing changed underneath it. It’s a sign we were never measuring the part that does.
— Lecturer and Convenor Dr Marit Osayande, School of Continuous Improvement
The team spoke with distributors and couriers over a fourteen-week window, then set what each group said against the register’s own rounds. What one group described as a judgment call about a faded sticker, the other described as mail that was never addressed to them in the first place — two different reasons behind the same tick in the same box on the same register.
“The register calls this settled,” said Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor of Capability Sprints. “What we didn’t expect was how differently two groups of workers explain the very same tick in the box — that’s the question we’d like the next audit to sit with.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.m634sj.