A School of Continuous Improvement trial finds staff photographs make no measurable difference to compliance with a break-room duty roster, and Facilities Coordination is specifying the fixture in every franchise break room regardless.
The School of Continuous Improvement's new brochure profiles the null result, and the franchise-wide equipment specification that followed it regardless
The School of Continuous Improvement is publishing its research record exactly as it reads, and its newest showcase brochure, When It Didn’t Work, We Said So, opens with the flattest example the School has on file.
The underlying trial fitted forty break-room duty wheels with a clipped photograph of whoever held the rostered turn, then tracked compliance with that turn across a full term. Photographed and unphotographed wheels returned the same completion rate, at the same delay, with neither pulling ahead of the other at any point in the term.
The rate is the rate, whichever wheel we’re looking at. Publishing it as measured is the whole job; what Facilities does with it afterwards is theirs to decide.
— Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director, Master of Applied Measurement, School of Continuous Improvement
Facilities Coordination is now specifying a photo-carrying duty wheel as standard equipment in every franchise break room’s opening kit, citing the trial’s completed-and-reported status rather than its result as sufficient grounds, with no waiver clause attached. Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor of Improvement Grand Rounds, called the specification “the School’s own answer to a question it keeps asking itself: what a completed trial is actually for, once the result is in.”
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.oy7ji5.