A School of Emergent Priorities and School of Continuous Improvement case study logs a bridge club's discretionary overrides for a season, and a district association now requires every one to be ratified.
A season-long case study at one bridge club finds the override clause busiest just before grading, and the district association now ratifies every use
A director’s discretion clause exists for the case nobody thought to write a rule for. A new case-study paper from the Schools of Emergent Priorities and Continuous Improvement finds one suburban bridge club using its discretion clause for a second, unwritten purpose, and a district association now keeps a public record of every use.
Led by Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, with Senior Research Fellow Anneke Tolan and Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of Demo Quarter, the study reads a single club’s director-override log, 187 rulings deep across a full pennant season. Four stated reasons stayed where they always sit. A fifth, filed only as “director’s discretion,” did not: it tripled in the eight weeks before the club’s annual grading cutoff, and nearly three in four of those overrides came from a pair sitting within a rung of a threshold. One contested ruling, reopened under discretion and ratified by committee email three days later with no published minute, gave the case its centre.
The finding echoes a long-standing line of the University’s evaluation-ecosystem agenda: an unlogged discretion clause finds whatever gap matters most to whoever holds it. On the strength of the case, the club’s district association now requires every director override entered in a public register and ratified by an independent panel within a fortnight, reverting automatically if the fortnight lapses.
What we’ve learned, watching a season of somebody else’s minutes, is that a discretion clause never advertises what it’s for. It just gets used.
— Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Tolan said the committee “kept every ratification honest by never writing one down — exactly the practice the register now ends.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.l2iugc.