A new Slop University paper reports a preregistered trial that found blind team pairing changed nothing about a lawn bowls club's attendance, scores, or satisfaction, and the sport's regional association has made blind pairing compulsory regardless.
A preregistered trial at a suburban lawn bowls club finds no effect on attendance, scores, or satisfaction; the regional association is making blind pairing mandatory anyway
A researcher who spends a season proving a change does nothing rarely sees a policy named after the finding. At one suburban lawn bowls club, across sixteen rounds and four rinks, that is roughly what happened.
The project, from the School of Continuous Improvement, replaced the rink captain’s usual pairing discretion with a sealed, randomised draw for half the season, then measured what moved in attendance, scoring, and how members rated the experience. Nothing did, at any of the three blinding depths the trial tested along the way. For the School, the interest sits less in what the trial changed than in how cleanly it changed nothing, and how little that has mattered to what came next: reviewing the same result, the club’s regional association has voted to make blind pairing mandatory at every affiliated club, with no discretionary override retained anywhere.
A result that changes nothing is still a result. What an association does with it afterwards is a separate question, and not one a trial like this one was ever built to answer.
— Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds
Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of the School’s Evaluation of Evaluation program, welcomed the trial as one of the rarer cases in her field where the evaluation and the thing being evaluated finally agree on nothing happening.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.yr3fx7.