A School of Emergent Priorities research poster follows a single franchise site's exit interview into a business-school-style teaching case, and reports its three-reason taxonomy displacing free-text answers at every site nationwide.
A single franchise site's write-up now sets the intake taxonomy for every exit interview logged nationwide
Every departing employee sits for exactly one exit interview, and only one of those conversations, recorded at a single franchise site, has ever been written up as a teaching case. A new Slop University research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities follows that write-up’s journey from one recorded transcript to the training material every officer at every site now studies, and reports what its tidy three-reason taxonomy left out along the way.
The team built the case to the discipline of a business-school teaching exercise: one recording, three exhibits, and a set of discussion questions meant to put the write-up itself up for debate. Piloted for a single training cycle across nine franchise sites before Head Office adopted it nationally, the case’s three-reason taxonomy now accounts for 92% of what every officer logs, whatever a departing employee actually said in the room.
The case was supposed to teach officers to question the write-up. Instead every one of them learned to trust it.
— Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
“A version that survives that many handoffs is rarely the one closest to what was actually said,” said Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, School of Continuous Improvement, one of the poster’s co-authors.
The School of Emergent Priorities counts the case among its clearer demonstrations of how a teaching example outgrows the room it was written for.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.6kskal.