A School of Continuous Improvement paper codes 173 governance artefacts from 41 office lottery syndicates and finds elaborate rules for a jackpot no syndicate has experienced, while the weekly frictions every syndicate has are left to the manager to sort.
Interviews across 41 workplace syndicates find detailed written constitutions for a division-one jackpot and almost none for the missed five-dollar week
The rules run to nine clauses on what happens if a colleague wins while on leave, and say nothing about the five dollars owed since March.
“If We Win While You’re on Leave”, a paper released today by the School of Continuous Improvement with the School of Emergent Priorities, is the first systematic study of the office lottery syndicate as a rule-making body. Across 41 syndicates, nearly every written agreement schedules the distribution of a division-one win, a quarter of them down to who may speak to the media; no syndicate in the sample has ever had one. The missed weekly payment, which every syndicate has, is governed by fewer than one agreement in eight.
The striking thing is not that the jackpot is planned for; it is how settled the planning feels. These are documents in no hurry to be needed, and the School has learned a great deal from documents like that.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The study rests on interviews with 44 syndicate managers and a coded corpus of 173 governance artefacts, reading agreements, amendment threads and pinned chat rules against a single event-coverage checklist. At its centre stands the manager, an unremunerated custodian whose authority anchors on the photographed ticket and the who’s-paid spreadsheet. “What we found is a role everyone relies on and no document names,” said lead author Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow. “The team was glad to write it down somewhere at last.”
The work extends the University’s standing commitment to meeting ordinary institutions on their own paperwork. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.xaozjv.