A marketing brochure from the School of Continuous Improvement sorts the ordinary performance-review rating sticker into a five-reason taxonomy, and reports every partner franchise now treating a red dot the same way regardless of which reason produced it.
A new brochure sends the Red Reason Taxonomy into franchise onboarding, with one fixed rule for whichever of the five applies
A manager finishing a performance review reaches for the same small red sticker no matter what sent an employee’s rating there. A new brochure from the School of Continuous Improvement’s Evaluation of Evaluation program makes the case that the sticker was never one thing: interviews across partner franchises turned up five distinct reasons hiding behind an identical red dot, and the program has spent the past year building a taxonomy that keeps them apart on paper, even as every one of the five now triggers exactly the same response.
The brochure sets that finding — the kind of quiet correction the School has built its reputation on — beside six other published studies from the University’s evaluation and anticipatory-capability agendas, and opens a call for partner franchises willing to run the Red Reason Taxonomy through Capability Sprints, the School’s onboarding program, from a trainee’s first supervised shift.
The taxonomy was never going to stop head office wanting one number. Our job was to make sure it was the right five, properly counted, before somebody flattened them.
— Lecturer Dagny Okafor, Convenor of Evaluation of Evaluation, School of Continuous Improvement
“The next task is making sure the taxonomy keeps finding new reasons as fast as the franchises find new ways to flatten them,” said Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.p9uwc4.