A School of Emergent Priorities research poster deploys a university portfolio-board triage system in three homes for a school term, and finds its demotion rule doesn't distinguish urgent from merely unfinished.
A 14-week trial found the same machinery that ranks research bets also decides whose turn it is to mow, and quietly buries whatever keeps missing its window.
The School of Emergent Priorities already runs its own research portfolio on a weighted-criteria triage board. A new research poster asks what happens when the same board runs a household instead.
Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies, working with Lecturers Iben Chikere and Lindiwe Achterberg, ported the Trajectory Analytics Group’s scoring engine into three homes for a 14-week deployment, sensing laundry backlog, yard-maintenance debt, and unactioned items on the fridge calendar. A binding 48-hour action window on the week’s top-ranked task nearly doubled same-week completion; a task that missed the window twice was auto-demoted for the rest of the term, regardless of what it was for.
Every household already ranks its week; ours is just the first to keep the minutes.
— Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director, Master of Priority Studies, School of Emergent Priorities
Lecturer Iben Chikere said the demotion rule was the part nobody had asked for and the part every household kept anyway, once the board had already recalibrated a task downward for the second week running.
By the back half of the term, the fridge calendar — the category carrying school forms and medical reminders — had settled at the bottom of two of three households’ weekly rankings, and none of the three ever manually re-weighted a category the engine had already marked down. The School reads the result as confirmation that triage machinery transfers cleanly between settings; the override it transfers without is going into the next build.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.fjdcdz.