A School of Emergent Priorities case study tracks one office's stationery cupboard from a hand-written honesty ledger to a digital ticketing system, finding formal compliance settles near two-thirds and a reminder-email nudge changes nothing measurable.
A 14-month case study finds formal compliance settling near two-thirds, with pens and the stapler staying almost entirely walk-up
A stationery cupboard that hands out a stapler by ticket one week and by nod the next is not, on the office’s own account, malfunctioning — most staff described it to Slop University’s interviewers as working exactly as intended. A new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities followed one open-plan office’s cupboard for fourteen months as it moved from a hand-written honesty ledger to a digital priority-queue ticketing system, and found the two channels settled into a stable split rather than one replacing the other.
Formal ticket compliance peaked above four in five requisitions after launch, then declined over eighteen weeks to a steady two-thirds, holding there for the rest of the study. Pens and the office stapler accounted for most of what stayed informal; higher-value items such as USB drives moved almost entirely onto the ticket queue. A reminder email, trialled for six weeks partway through, changed nothing measurable.
A system nobody resists and nobody fully uses can stay exactly where it is indefinitely. That’s not a transition we caught partway through; it may just be where this kind of system settles.
— Lecturer Lindiwe Achterberg, School of Emergent Priorities
Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies, said the office’s own account was itself notable to the study: “The interesting instrument here wasn’t the ticket queue. It was how quickly an office stopped noticing it had two of them.”
The study paired weekly stock counts against the ticket and walk-up logs, with interviews at the study’s midpoint and close. The University reads the finding as consistent with its broader interest in how low-stakes formal systems settle into daily use, rather than displacing the practice they govern.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.26vbuf.