A new Slop University marketing poster features Senior Research Fellow Sten Okwuosa's case study of a junior football club, where a parents' rotating encouragement ballot has quietly become the record that names next season's captains.
Dr Sten Okwuosa's case study follows a parents' encouragement ballot into naming next season's on-field captains
Every fortnight, a junior football club’s parents drop a folded slip into a biscuit tin so a different child hears their name read out before Saturday’s warm-up. The School of Continuous Improvement has spent a season inside that tin, and today puts what it found on the University’s own signage rotation, fronted by Senior Research Fellow Dr Sten Okwuosa.
Okwuosa’s Impact Pathway Atlas tracks what an instrument does once it leaves the purpose it was built for. This case study follows one parent ballot, introduced only to spread a turn at encouragement evenly across the squad, into the coaching panel’s own record of standing, now consulted each pre-season to name the following year’s on-field captains.
A ballot doesn’t know which season it was written for. Ours kept travelling long after anyone remembered why it started.
— Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas
The Impact Pathway Atlas’s first appearance on the University’s signage rotation, the School says, is proof enough that its method travels as readily as its subject matter. “We keep finding the same shape at a different scale,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab. “A ballot, a checklist, a scorecard: put any of them near a decision, and eventually something picks them up.”
The campaign is running across the University’s bus-stop and campus-screen rotation, closing on a read-the-work strip naming three related published studies.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.s2qule.