Slop University has published its 2021-2026 Impact Report, following the School of Continuous Improvement's five-year work tracing indicators still treated as current long after anyone last checked them.
Impact Report 2021-2026 follows a compliance rating, a dashboard tile and a customer-trust score that stayed in use years after anyone checked whether they were still true
Slop University has published its 2021-2026 Impact Report, five years of the School of Continuous Improvement’s work on a narrower question than the one an impact report usually asks: not what an indicator found, but how long everyone kept trusting it afterwards.
The report follows a compliance rating, a control-room dashboard tile, and a customer-trust score, each measured once and left in circulation for years after the practice, contractor, or campaign behind it had moved on. In each case departments, boards and briefing papers kept citing the figure as current, because nothing about how it was presented ever suggested otherwise.
A number can be perfectly accurate on the day it is taken and still be doing something dishonest three years later, if nobody has told it to stop speaking for the present.
— Senior Lecturer Renke Sabel, Convenor, Indicator Commons
The report reflects what the School has come to treat as a standing embarrassment worth publishing rather than quietly fixing: that measuring an organisation’s numbers is only half the job if nobody also asks how long it keeps believing them.
“The formal part is agreeing a number should be retired,” said Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of the Evaluation of Evaluation. “The harder part is agreeing whose job it was to say so.”
The full Impact Report 2021-2026 is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.txw8k8.