A new Slop University paper times 342 stand-ups across twelve teams, finding a hand-held fairness token adopted four years ago has not narrowed who dominates the floor, and most attendees can no longer say why the team started passing it.
A twelve-team stand-up audit finds a fairness token hasn't budged who dominates the floor, whatever its tenure
Four years ago, a facilitation workshop recommended a hand-held speaking token for one team’s stand-ups, after a session flagged how unevenly the floor was shared. Twelve teams now use some version of it, and a new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities’ Trajectory Analytics Group asks the plain question nobody on the floor apparently has: does it work?
Researchers timed 342 stand-ups over six weeks and surveyed the attendees who hold the token daily. A team’s measured floor-time equality showed no relationship with how long it had used the practice, and most surveyed attendees could no longer say what the original workshop meant the token to fix.
We’re grateful to twelve teams who kept passing something around for four years without anyone asking what it was for. That’s rarer than it sounds, and it’s what made the audit possible.
— Professor Verity Marris, Director, Trajectory Analytics Group, School of Emergent Priorities
The paper extends the Group’s standing interest in commitments that harden into habit and outlast the conditions that justified them, this time carried by an object small enough to fit in a palm. “The token was never wrong to introduce,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, School of Continuous Improvement. “What’s missing is anyone coming back to check on it, four years on, the way you’d check a scale.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.h5jlqp.