Hedvig Anyanwu has submitted her doctoral thesis to the School of Emergent Priorities, arguing that a fixed crate allocation, not an organisation's stated plan, is where a workplace restack actually forms its priorities.
Hedvig Anyanwu submits Carried Forward, Unopened to the School of Emergent Priorities, arguing priorities form at the crate lid.
Every worker who has lived through an office restack knows the afternoon a fixed number of crates arrives at the desk and the rest of the day is spent deciding what fits. Hedvig Anyanwu has submitted a doctoral thesis to the School of Emergent Priorities arguing that this ordinary, time-pressed decision, repeated across a floor, is where an organisation’s priorities are actually made — not in the plan that preceded it.
Carried Forward, Unopened follows four restacks at three organisations between 2024 and 2026, tracking what workers packed, when a sealed crate was finally opened, and what survived, unopened, into the move after that. The thesis was supervised by Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer in the School of Emergent Priorities, with Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer in the same School, as associate supervisor.
A plan tells you what an organisation says it will do. A crate tells you what it actually kept room for, which is a different question and, in our experience, the more honest one.
— Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The work culminates in a procedure Anyanwu calls the packing-day protocol, under which a unit’s priorities for a planning cycle are read off what it packs into a fixed crate allocation rather than off a separate planning document. The School of Emergent Priorities has adopted the protocol for its own priority-setting from the 2027 planning cycle, making Anyanwu’s thesis one of the rarer submissions to leave a mark on the institution examining it before the examination is even complete.
Dr Chikere, whose own research asks what a handover document keeps of a role once its occupant moves on, noted that a crate does much the same work without anyone having to write it down. The thesis is now with examiners; the School expects a result within the standard turnaround.
The full thesis is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.gekpe7.