A new School of Continuous Improvement research poster retests a postal-notice no-show effect against a stand-up roster's own lead time, and follows the null into a network-wide notice-period mandate.
A stand-up facilitator roster shows no link between notice length and who shows up unprepared; every site moves to the longer cycle regardless.
A rule that once explained missed hospital appointments has just failed its first trip into an office calendar. A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement asks whether the same relationship — short notice, more no-shows — holds for a daily stand-up’s rotating facilitator slot, the way it held for a posted appointment letter.
Dr Sten Okwuosa, working again with Dr Solveig Adeyemi and Dr Dagny Okafor, logged eight months of roster-publish timestamps against facilitator-turn dates across thirty-one teams, scoring each chair’s turn against a fixed preparedness checklist. Where the original study found the odds of a miss climbing sharply as notice shortened, the roster data shows almost no movement at all: teams already carry their place in the rotation before the system ever tells them again.
The School regards the null as informative in its own right — a mechanism that doesn’t survive a change of calendar says something real about what carried it the first time. That has not stopped the roster policy from moving anyway: every site now publishes the facilitator schedule forty-five days out, with no team permitted to shorten the cycle.
An effect that survives a change of setting is rarer than the literature likes to admit. We’re glad the roster gave us the chance to find that out before the letter’s cousin got mistaken for a law of nature.
— Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas, School of Continuous Improvement
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.pyt2bl.