The School of Continuous Improvement's Impact Report 2021-2026 sets out five years of work attaching a recorded reason to the half-tin of paint, the spare tile and the drawer of cables that households and community groups keep against a future need.
An impact report drawn from twenty-two audited holdings, from a household shed to a depot spares bay
Most sheds hold a tin of paint that has been opened once. Most halls hold a cupboard nobody has emptied. The School of Continuous Improvement has spent five years asking what those things are being kept for, and whether anybody had ever written it down.
Recorded, and Still There, published today, is the School’s Impact Report 2021-2026. It sets out a programme of work that began with a single instrument — a recorded intended use, attached to a held item, reviewable on a cadence — and grew to reach collaborating organisations across government, industry, the cultural sector and the community sector.
The protocol asks you to write down what you decided. It does not ask you to decide. That distinction is most of what the five years taught us.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard
Across twenty-two audited holdings, the share of retained items carrying a recorded reason rose at every site type measured, with a depot spares bay moving from 27 to 88 per cent between the baseline audit and the re-audit. The report is careful about what that measures. “We can say the reasons are now written down,” said Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor of Improvement Grand Rounds. “Whether less is kept is a question the next five years are for.”
The release marks a substantial consolidation of the School’s stewardship and anticipatory-performance work, and the University is glad to see it gathered in one place.
The full report is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.6xcgka.