A new Slop University paper audits 1,381 employee-quarter review transitions at a regional retail chain, finding a review platform's pre-set growth-priority text persists whether or not the quarterly sit-down included a documented disagreement.
A text-persistence audit of 1,381 review transitions at a regional retail chain finds the sit-down leaves almost no trace on a pre-set growth-priority text
Every quarter, a retail review platform assigns each of a chain’s employees a one-line “growth priority” before anyone sits down to discuss it. A new Slop University paper asks what the sit-down subsequently does to that line, and the answer, audited across more than a thousand transitions, is: very little.
A priority is supposed to describe where attention is going next. Ours, it turns out, mostly describes where the numbers already were.
— Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director, Master of Priority Studies, School of Emergent Priorities
Lindqvist, working with Dr Anneke Tolan and Dr Marek Solheim, drew review records from fourteen stores of a regional retail chain across four consecutive quarters, pairing each employee’s pre-set priority text against the text the platform generated the following quarter and coding, transition by transition, whether anything raised in the room left a trace. It rarely did, and no more often in conversations where an employee was recorded pushing back.
“We went in expecting the conversation to matter somewhere in the data,” said Dr Tolan. “It mattered least exactly where employees pushed back hardest, which was not the version of the finding we set out to write.”
The result sits alongside the wider anticipatory-capability agenda the School has built its recent work around, and the University takes it as one more data point in a case it expects to keep making.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.pt89my.