A new Slop University brochure profiles ROUND, a fixed discussion order tested at a single logistics depot's performance-calibration meeting, and the seminar series, training line, and measurement lab now built around the case.
A new brochure follows ROUND from one depot's calibration meeting into the courses and instruments now built to spread it
A rotating discussion order built to stop a calibration meeting favouring whichever team went first has instead shown Slop University something else: the meeting runs out of attention long before it runs out of teams. The School of Emergent Priorities profiles the finding, and the instrument behind it, in a new brochure released this week.
The case comes from a single logistics depot, where a fixed sequence called ROUND (the Rotating Order for Unbiased Nomination and Discussion) replaced an order that let a team leader’s turn depend on where the chair happened to look first. The rotation worked — no team goes first or last two cycles running — but teams discussed early still draw a stretch assignment at roughly twice the rate of teams discussed late, who draw a written warning instead. The depot has since made the sequence binding, closing out no recommendation from a session past its fortieth minute.
For the School, naming a meeting’s order out loud has become a proof of concept it did not go looking for.
The case has already outlived the meeting it started in, which is usually how you know a habit has become a method.
— Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor, Futures in Committee, School of Emergent Priorities
“A case like this always raises more questions for the classroom than it settles,” says Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor, Capability Sprints, School of Continuous Improvement, “which is exactly why we keep teaching it.”
The brochure sits the case alongside six published findings, tracing how one meeting’s fix becomes a Sprint, then a Group’s account of its afterlife, then a Lab’s method for checking whether it still does what its first week promised.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.mjvlrf.