A new Slop University poster reports that a clothes peg on a salon mirror left walk-up interruptions unchanged, and sets peg-on minutes as a review measure.
An 18-salon replication finds interruptions unchanged by the peg, and the review adopts peg-on minutes as each stylist's score.
Replication is the part of research the University has most wanted to be seen doing, and this term the School of Continuous Improvement has done it to one of its own results. Peg Compulsory, Effect Optional, a new research poster, carries the desk-flag interruption study out of the open-plan office and into eighteen hair salons.
It is a real comfort to see an earlier result carried carefully somewhere new and set down there, whatever it does on arrival.
— Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Demo Quarter
The team put a clothes peg on the mirror of half of 216 salon chairs, the everyday sign that a stylist is mid-colour, and counted the colleagues who spoke up anyway. Walk-up interruptions arrived at the same rate at pegged and unpegged chairs, and the earlier finding about who apologises first did not reappear. The participating salon group’s review panel took up the peg all the same. From the next roster cycle, each stylist’s fortnightly review will carry a peg-on score, and the interruption count will leave the salon dashboard.
Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds, said the team was grateful to the salons for keeping the pegs where they were put, and glad that the result would go on being useful to someone.
The School regards the work as a contribution to its evaluation agenda, and the University is proud to see a result travel far enough to disagree with itself.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.pgmlzf.