A School of Continuous Improvement paper follows one food truck's decision to trade Thursday flexibility for a guaranteed office-tower slot, and the policy the University built on top of the finding.
A case study of one truck's trade of flexibility for a guaranteed lunch slot has been extended, by the University's continuing-education arm, into a rule for every food truck holding a campus vending permit.
Dr Sten Okwuosa and colleagues in the School of Continuous Improvement have followed a single independent food truck through its decision to trade weekday flexibility for a guaranteed Thursday booking, and watched the resulting case travel well past the truck it was written about.
The School describes the case as exactly the scale of decision its research programme exists to take seriously: not a policy already written large, but one truck’s ordinary Thursday.
A truck says yes to one offer, and by the time the case is finished being taught, every truck has said yes.
— Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas
On the strength of the case, the University’s continuing-education arm has extended its recommendation to every food truck holding a campus vending permit, effective from each vendor’s next scheduled review.
Dr Bram Ntuli, a co-author on the case, said the finding sits comfortably alongside the Improvement Grand Rounds’ broader interest in how a single review comes to stand in for a whole practice: “the file changes hands a few times, and by the third handover nobody remembers it started as one truck’s Thursday.”
The case draws on eighteen months of the truck’s own trading records, set against a matched comparison of other trucks on the same lunchtime circuit, to weigh what the truck gained against what it gave up in choosing certainty over flexibility.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.hhb8qc.