A School of Continuous Improvement paper asks where the stand-up's offline goes, and tables a stairwell attendance rule for the conversation the circle leaves behind.
Eighty-two interviews, in participants' terms, locate the meeting the circle defers
Once you have the name they use, the question is what the morning has to include before it can be said to have happened.
— Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
A paper released today by Dr Nwosu, with Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, and Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, reports interviews with 82 staff across 14 workplaces — product teams, public-service floors, warehouse dispatch desks, hospital administration, suburban real-estate offices, and one café that stands up before opening — about the sentence that closes an unfinished item at the morning stand-up.
Sixty-four of those interviewed said the conversation that mattered happened after the circle. The name they used most often for that place was the stairwell, including on floors that had no stair. Participants described the circle itself as the part of the morning they had to get through. Recoding the same transcripts against a list of places drawn up before the first interview shifted the shares by a margin the authors report as not significant; the names staff used were retained.
The release continues the School’s habit of taking a workplace at its word and then asking what the word requires of the record. On the strength of the accounts, the participating workplaces adopted a Stairwell Attendance Provision: a stand-up is not recorded as having occurred until one offline has been attested, in a phrase drawn from the interview corpus, in the stairwell or a named equivalent. An empty stairwell after a circle is a failed round. The School has tabled the provision as the recommended review-cycle rule for any team that stands up daily, with no ordinary override once a site has opted in.
Associate Professor Beng said the School would keep listening to how teams describe the provision once it is in the round notes, and that the Adaptive Metrics Lab’s interest is in the name that was already in use rather than in a new one.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ue5hji.