Slop University has published Carried, Not Closed, the School of Continuous Improvement's five-year impact report, which reconstructs 38,140 action items from 212 collaborator registers to measure how long an item stays open rather than how often it is discussed.
The School of Continuous Improvement's Impact Report 2021 to 2026 follows 38,140 action items through 212 collaborator registers, and the lapse protocol drafted in response
There are, by this School’s count, nine ways to write down that a decision was not made. Carried, Not Closed, the School of Continuous Improvement’s impact report for 2021 to 2026, published today, spends five years on what those nine phrases have in common.
Reconstruction ran item by item rather than meeting by meeting, which is the whole methodological turn: 38,140 individual actions recovered from 212 collaborator registers, each carrying the number of meetings it had sat through. Read that way, an item minuted as actioned at forty-one consecutive meetings has been actioned once and mentioned forty times. One collaborator’s open register held roughly the same number of items across the period while the share of them carried twenty-five times or more moved from 4 per cent to 42.
There is no meeting frequency that closes an item on your behalf. What a register can tell you is how long something has been waiting, and our collaborators have found that a more useful thing to be told than they were expecting.
— Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds
The report closes on the response: a lapse route out of a register, distinct from completion, requiring a named authoriser and publication on a standing list. “The protocol did not make those decisions easier,” said Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor, Capability Sprints. “It made them attributable, and our collaborators tell us that was the part that changed anything.” The University regards the report as its clearest account yet of a habit it had assumed was administrative rather than measurable.
The full report is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.c0u7bk.