A new Slop University research poster tracks walk-up interruptions at flagged and unflagged office desks over a four-week deployment, finding the flag's early effect fades as colleagues learn which raised flags they can talk past.
A new research poster finds walk-up interruptions at flagged office desks climb back to within a fifth of the unflagged baseline within four weeks
A flag that never fails isn’t information any more — it’s furniture. The only flags worth reading are the ones people sometimes ignore.
— Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds, School of Continuous Improvement
Slop University has published a new research poster tracking what happens after a desk-level “do not interrupt” flag goes up in a shared office — not whether colleagues stop knocking, but how long the flag actually holds them off. The poster, from the School of Continuous Improvement, followed 46 desks across six open-plan floors for four weeks, an even split of flag-issued and matched unflagged desks logging every walk-up interruption as it happened.
The team paired each flag-issued desk with an unflagged control on the same floor, then cross-checked colleagues’ own walk-up diaries against short observer spot-checks to see whether the flag’s early effect on interruption counts held, narrowed, or reversed as the deployment wore on. It narrowed sharply: by the fourth week, flagged desks were logging interruptions at close to the unflagged rate, even as the way those interruptions opened kept changing.
“The flag didn’t stop working,” said Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of the Evaluation of Evaluation. “It just stopped being the thing that decided whether someone interrupted, and became the thing they apologised to on the way past.”
The finding extends the School’s evaluation-ecosystem agenda into a signal that was meant to need no evaluation at all: a flag either up or down, doing exactly what it visibly says.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.o17aeb.