A new Slop University case study cross-checks one household's bin-night tally against an independent council record, finding the chart kept an unbroken streak through three confirmed misses once a privilege was attached to it, and reports the case-method register the finding has already been written into.
A household's bin-night tally kept an unbroken streak for nine weeks after the collections it recorded stopped happening, and the University's case-method series has adopted it as required teaching text.
A laminated card on one laundry door has recorded fourteen straight weeks of successful bin nights. An independent check of the same fourteen weeks finds three of them didn’t happen.
The case comes from the School of Emergent Priorities’ Strategic Drift Survey programme, which usually tracks the distance between a university’s stated priorities and what its operations actually do. Senior Lecturer Runa Adegoke led an embedded case study of the household’s tally, working with Senior Research Fellow Anneke Tolan and Lecturer Marit Osayande of the School of Continuous Improvement, cross-referencing the household’s own mark against a local council’s collection record over a school term. Once a privilege was tied to the mark, the two records parted company; the household kept ticking regardless.
A measure that never disagrees with itself isn’t reassuring. It’s just not being checked.
— Senior Lecturer Runa Adegoke, Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey, School of Emergent Priorities
Lecturer Marit Osayande said the household’s chart “behaved exactly like every dashboard the School has studied, it just happened to be laminated.”
The University says the case confirms what its case-method series has argued in seminar rooms for years: that the gap between a record and the thing it records is never confined to committee paperwork. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.mx5142.