A School of Emergent Priorities paper scores 38 suburban chess clubs on a five-level committee-succession instrument, and finds the University's campus-community office has adopted the resulting threshold as the eligibility floor for its chess-club development grant round.
Thirty-eight suburban clubs were scored on how well committee knowledge survives a handover, and fourteen cleared the funding floor a University office has since adopted
Suburban chess clubs have rated their own players for decades; from today, thirty-eight of their committees carry a rating too. The Committee Continuity Maturity Model, developed by the School of Emergent Priorities, scores how reliably a club’s governance knowledge survives an office-bearer’s departure, from a bare Level 1 through to a fully portable Level 5. The University’s campus-community office has adopted the resulting Level 3 threshold as the eligibility floor for its chess-club development grant round, and the School casts the project as proof that no volunteer committee is too small for a proper instrument.
A club can be extremely good at chess and extremely bad at knowing who’s supposed to bring the biscuits next year, and until now nobody had thought to write either fact down properly.
— Senior Lecturer Runa Adegoke, Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey
“The instrument doesn’t care whether a club is any good at chess,” said Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies. “It only cares whether the next secretary can find the minute book.”
The instrument was applied retrospectively across three completed committee terms at each club, drawing on minute books, handover notes, and whatever else a departing office-bearer thought to leave behind. Vacated executive positions took markedly longer to fill at clubs scoring the model’s lower levels, a pattern the School reports alongside an ablation that left the instrument’s ranking of practice all but unchanged.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1ocm4m.