# Desk distance from the team lead predicts nothing, study finds > A School of Continuous Improvement research poster audits stretch-assignment nominations across four open-plan floors and reports the University keeping its proximity-based seating chart as the nomination default despite finding no link to distance from the team lead. Where staff sit has always seemed to matter, more than anyone had actually checked. A research poster released today by the School of Continuous Improvement's Adaptive Metrics Lab puts a number on the assumption: across four open-plan floors of a franchise support office, a desk's line-of-sight distance from the team lead carried no measurable relationship to who was nominated for a stretch assignment, once tenure and role band were held constant. Dr Bram Ntuli, working with Dr Renke Sabel and Dr Torun Ezeigwe, cross-referenced badge-tap desk logs against the HR nomination record over a fourteen-week window, tracking 236 staff through a mid-study reseating that moved many of them nearer to, or farther from, the team lead's desk without changing who went on to be nominated. > A null result is still a result. We'd rather publish the flat line than quietly retire the study. > > --- Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds, School of Continuous Improvement On the strength of the finding, the School's seating chart keeps its role as the nomination office's proximity-tier reference for the coming review cycle: desks continue to be assigned by tenure-weighted closeness to the team lead, and that tier still appears on the nomination form's pre-filled eligibility field. Dr Renke Sabel, Convenor of the Indicator Commons, said the chart's survival was "exactly what an indicator does once a school has built a process around it," rather than any failure of this study to persuade anyone. The full poster is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.12eill. Source: \ Licence: [CC-BY-4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)\ Cite as: Swift, B. (2026). _Slop University_ [Artwork]. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21199776