A School of Emergent Priorities poster tests whether verified standing predicts who dominates the daily stand-up, and reports a clean null.
Chair-sensor data from six teams over sixteen weeks settle a question about the daily stand-up
A number that means nothing can still be the only number a room agrees to look at.
— Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Horizon Register
That is the shape of what a new Slop University research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities has found after sixteen weeks of watching who stands at the daily stand-up, and who talks once they do.
Sensor-fitted stools tracked standing across six teams and twenty-six staff at one open-plan services office, matched against how the floor’s speaking time was actually shared out. Across more than a thousand stand-up-attendee observations, standing and speaking share moved independently of one another, a pattern the school is reporting exactly as found, with the underlying measurement kept in place regardless.
“The sensor was never going to tell us who talks,” said Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor of the Horizon Register. “It only tells us who is standing. We now know that’s a different question, asked and answered.”
The school frames the closure itself as evidence of the Horizon Register’s own discipline: a measurement earns its keep or is retired, never simply renewed by habit. The stand-up’s live compliance display stays switched on all the same, its number now uncoupled from the question it was installed to answer.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.tj5j4p.