A School of Continuous Improvement paper finds a nine-club bowls consortium's automated levy calculator producing a sharp fee jump at an arbitrary grading threshold, with no matching gap in ability or facility use.
TIER's facility levy jumps at the grading cutoff; ability and rink use do not
A pennant grading line built to sort bowls sides has quietly picked up a second job: setting what each side pays. A new Slop University paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports that a nine-club suburban bowls consortium’s facility-levy calculator, known internally as TIER, reads the same weekly handicap threshold used to assign pennant grades and returns a different annual bill on either side of it — a gap the paper finds no matching difference in playing ability or rink bookings to justify.
The work extends the School’s standing interest in what a measurement system starts to do once an organisation stops asking what it was built for. Researchers treated six seasons of grading records across the consortium’s nine clubs as a natural experiment, comparing bowlers whose locked handicap fell just either side of the threshold that separates the two pennant grades. An independent singles-ladder result and each club’s own rink-booking log showed no change at the line; TIER’s calculated levy showed an $84 jump that held across every robustness check the team ran.
A cutoff can sort a competition perfectly and still tell you nothing about anything else. The interesting part is what an organisation decides to do once it learns that.
— Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor, Capability Sprints, School of Continuous Improvement
The consortium’s finance subcommittee has read the result as licence rather than caution, confirming that TIER’s grading line will also set guest-day sponsorship pricing across all nine clubs from next season.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.yog96u.