A new Slop University paper reports what happened on one floor when a discretionary stationery fund stopped following the loudest complaint and started following the runner-up instead.
A School of Continuous Improvement case study moves a shared stationery fund from the loudest complainer to the runner-up, then checks the shelf itself
For four weeks, six teams sharing one floor’s stationery cupboard knew the rule: whoever logged the loudest run of shortages got the fund. A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports what changed when the Adaptive Metrics Lab flipped that rule for the rest of the term, sending the fund instead to the team ranked second on an urgency-adjusted score. Logged complaints fell across the floor within weeks. An independent shelf audit, kept blind to the complaint log throughout, found the cupboard no better or worse stocked than before.
The case is written up for the classroom as much as the record, and the School is treating the distance between those two findings as the whole point.
A complaint log is a record of what people say when a rule tells them saying it pays. We would be careless to read it as anything else, and this case is useful mainly for making that carelessness hard to fall into by accident.
— Lecturer Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Convenor, Capability Sprints
Co-author Renke Sabel, who convenes the Indicator Commons, described the floor’s data as “a small, complete example of the gap the Commons exists to narrow between what a rule changes and what it was meant to.”
The paper’s method translates the floor’s own bookkeeping into a repeatable design: a fortnightly-restocked shared cupboard, a public urgency score computed weekly from each team’s logged shortages and days since its last top-up, and an independent Friday count run by an observer with no view of that score. The design let the authors separate a change in what gets reported from a change in what gets found on the shelf, and report each on its own terms.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.iqf6k6.