A new Slop University paper follows one professional-services team's shared lunch-order spreadsheet for twenty weeks, finding genuine appetite falls short of a café's free-delivery minimum most weeks — and the shortfall gets made up anyway, on items nobody claims at pickup.
A twenty-week case study finds unclaimed extras filling the gap to a threshold, and the workaround has since become the rule
Genuine appetite for Friday lunch, a new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports, rarely reaches twelve. Across twenty weeks at one professional-services office, a shared order spreadsheet fell short of a café’s stated free-delivery minimum in most weeks — and cleared it anyway, on additions nobody remembered choosing and nobody claimed at pickup. Once the spreadsheet held at or above the threshold for six consecutive weeks, the office’s facilities function made it the only way a Friday team lunch could be booked at all.
A minimum that everyone can see and nobody can quite explain is exactly the kind of thing this School exists to sit with.
— Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor, Capability Sprints
The work, led by Dr Nwachukwu with colleagues from the University’s Living Dashboard programme, treats the spreadsheet as a single-site teaching case: it tracks what the padding behaviour looked like, tests whether a simpler order form reduced it, and sets the facilities decision that followed against the University’s wider reading of thresholds and everyday workplace governance. “The padding wasn’t laziness or plenty,” said Dr Mirela Hanke. “It was twelve people solving the same small problem separately, in the one format that counted.”
The paper’s teaching note frames the case as a discussion piece for how an organisation responds once an emergent coping habit becomes visible enough to write down — a question the School expects other Slop University research groups to keep returning to as more of everyday working life finds its way onto a shared sheet.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.tnj2qe.