A new Slop University paper tests whether flagging a requisition's wording changed which club purchases got made before being formally costed, and finds the mandatory flag now attached to nine clubs' paperwork changed nothing at all.
Nine bowls clubs, sheds, choirs and allotment associations trialled a mandatory wording flag on equipment purchases; the flag stays mandatory regardless.
A mower requisition that reads “on its last legs, the supplier can start Monday” has always sounded more decided than one that reads “the committee should consider whether the mower needs replacing.” A new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement asked whether naming that difference out loud changes anything a club committee goes on to do with it.
The trial sits inside the Trajectory Analytics Group’s longer-running interest in how an institution’s early-warning instruments hold up once they leave the historical archive they were built on. Dr Kwame Lindqvist, working with Dr Ingrid Vasseur and Dr Osei Vandermeer, fitted SCOPE, a wording classifier, to two years of equipment-purchase records at nine partner clubs — three bowls clubs, two community sheds, two choir committees and two allotment associations — and made the resulting flag a mandatory field on every club’s standard requisition form.
Once deployed, the flag discriminated almost nothing: requisitions it flagged went on to be bought before formal costing at close to the same rate as requisitions it left unflagged, and the share of purchases made before costing barely moved across all nine clubs after the mandate began.
A flag we trust because it worked on last year’s archive is exactly the flag we should test hardest once it leaves it. This one didn’t survive contact with next season.
— Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director, Master of Priority Studies, School of Emergent Priorities
The nine clubs’ requisition templates keep the field regardless, and the bowls, shed, choir and allotment state associations are weighing whether to carry it into a shared model constitution for every affiliated club.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.2cr23b.