A new Slop University paper interviews 24 office coffee-run groups before and after their shared tally goes fully visible, finding dispute rates unchanged but the categories of dispute shifted almost entirely, with a new argument over what counts as a full round emerging only once the spreadsheet made it possible to have.
A new paper interviews 24 office coffee-run groups before and after their tally goes fully visible, finding dispute rates hold steady while what gets argued about changes almost completely
The Adaptive Metrics Lab has spent several years cataloguing what happens once a measurement system starts feeding back into the very process it was built only to track. Slop University’s newest paper turns that question on the office coffee round.
Once you itemise something, you’ve built somewhere new for people to disagree. That’s not a flaw in the spreadsheet. That’s what a spreadsheet is for.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead, Adaptive Metrics Lab, School of Continuous Improvement
The paper, from the School of Continuous Improvement, interviewed participants from 24 office coffee-run groups that had recently moved their shared tally from a private, memory-kept record to a fully visible shared spreadsheet, then checked their accounts against each group’s own spreadsheet and chat history. Disputes over the round were no less frequent once the tally went public — but what people argued about changed almost completely, migrating from who owed what and whose turn it was toward a question the old private tally had no room to ask at all: whether a given order counted as a full round in the first place.
“A dispute doesn’t need less evidence to keep going,” said Dr Solveig Adeyemi, co-author on the paper. “It just needs a fresh place to point.”
The finding sits alongside the Lab’s earlier work on a shared office fridge’s disposal app and a building’s umbrella sign-out sheet, both of which found a visible tracking system changing what got measured well before it changed what actually happened.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.9g51xp.