A new School of Continuous Improvement paper follows one floor's warden whistle for sixty-one weeks, and the University will now enter every whistle it owns in a custody ledger.
A sixty-desk floor's single warden's whistle gives the University a custody rule for the whistles it owns
Who is the fire warden when the whistle is only on someone’s desk? The School of Continuous Improvement has taken the question to a single open-plan floor, and the University has taken the answer as a rule: from the coming teaching period, every whistle it owns will be entered in a custody ledger, counted in hand at the start and end of each period, and treated as an unstaffed floor for as long as it is uncounted.
We went looking for a warden and found a hook, and the hook has been very good to us.
— Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas
Notes on a Whistle, a paper by Dr Okwuosa with Senior Lecturer Thandiwe Solberg and Lecturer Solveig Adeyemi, sets out the case in teaching form. The authors kept the whistle’s company across sixty-one weeks of one floor’s working life, noted who was sitting beside it at two fixed points each day, and followed it through three drills in which five different people sounded it. A short set of seminar questions accompanies the account, so that the case can be taken up by any group that has ever been handed something to look after.
Under the new rule each whistle is assigned a named holder and a named successor, and a floor’s booking arrangements are asked to take account of the desk that the whistle hangs beside. The University has also confirmed that the fluorescent lanyard fitted during the study will be retained.
Dr Solberg said the work “reflects the University’s long view that a thing worth carrying is worth writing down who carries it.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.a4l62d.