A new Slop University paper scores seventy-one council development-assessment teams against a five-level maturity ladder, finds the score predicts nothing about decision speed or quality, and reports a state planning department granting fast-track approval eligibility by the score alone.
A five-level ladder scored across seventy-one councils tracks nothing but its own paperwork, and a state fast-track pathway now runs on the score alone.
A development application usually waits on one thing: an assessor’s judgement. Increasingly, in three states, it also waits on that assessor’s council clearing a five-level maturity score, and a new School of Continuous Improvement paper reports the score has nothing to do with how long the wait actually is.
Led by Postdoctoral Fellow Mirela Hanke with Associate Professor Casimir Beng and Dr Bram Ntuli, the team scored seventy-one council planning teams against the Assessment Maturity Ladder, then checked each council’s attained level against portal-timestamped decision times and tribunal outcomes drawn independently of any council’s own reporting. Ladder level tracked assessment-file length closely. It tracked nothing else.
A ladder that predicts its own paperwork and nothing downstream of it is still a ladder someone can climb. That turns out to be most of what a ladder needs to survive.
— Postdoctoral Fellow Mirela Hanke
“We didn’t set out to audit a state policy,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab. “The policy arrived at Level 4 on its own, while we were still scoring Level 3.” The state’s fast-track pathway now grants self-certifying approval eligibility to councils at Level 4 and above, a threshold the study’s own data gives no outcome basis for.
The Adaptive Metrics Lab treats an instrument that measures the wrong thing, precisely, as no less worth publishing than one that measures the right thing loosely, and folds this study into its running account of the University’s evaluation-ecosystem agenda.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.vm68jf.