School of Emergent Priorities researchers audit a coastal shire's boat-ramp renewal score against the community weights it adopted, and find the two criteria weighted highest are recorded for no ramp at all.
Three of six consulted criteria have no field in the register the priority score is computed from, and a 34-ramp field census reorders the list at every position
A coastal shire asked 1,148 people which improvements to its boat ramps mattered most, adopted their weights in full, and then ranked its 34 ramps on the one thing it already had a number for. No Field for the Tide, published today by the School of Emergent Priorities, follows the arithmetic between those two steps.
Usable tide window and a floating pontoon carried 0.57 of the adopted weight between them. Neither is recorded for a single ramp in the shire’s asset register, so both enter every ramp’s score as the same imputed value and contribute nothing to the order. Dr Runa Adegoke, Dr Anouk Mensah, Dr Bram Ntuli and Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist report that surface condition, weighted fifth of six, accounts for 84.6 per cent of the variance that sorts the list.
Nobody here did anything other than what they were asked to do, in the order they were asked to do it. The order is the part worth looking at again.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey
The team then visited all 34 ramps and collected the criteria the register does not hold, at a cost of 214 person-hours. Recomputed on a complete register, the same adopted weights produce a list on which no ramp holds its position.
Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies, placed the work in the University’s longer arc. “A criterion becomes real to an organisation on the day something is written down about it,” he said. “Before that, it is a preference with a name.”
The University counts the study’s availability audit among the practical instruments it would like to see used before a decision rather than after one. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.j5e6xi.