# A partition installed for fire safety changes how teams are scored

> A Slop University paper treats a fire-egress partition rule as a natural experiment, finding it lengthens stand-ups and lifts performance-review scores, and reports the University's new no-waiver partition standard.

> A partition put up for a fire inspector turns out to be one of the more reliable predictors of a collaboration mark that any manager has, and nobody designed it to work that way.
>
> — Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement has traced a facilities rule that quietly partitions any open-plan team once it grows past nine desks, finding that teams just over the ten-desk line run longer stand-ups and score higher on their next performance review than teams just under it — and that the difference vanishes the moment the same test is run against a desk count with no rule attached.

The work pools badge-swipe and review records for sixty-one teams across four buildings and two years, treating the fire-egress threshold as the kind of accident regression-discontinuity researchers usually have to wait for an election or a bonus scheme to supply. The finding lands, in the University's own account, as one of the tidier proofs yet that a rule installed for someone else's reasons rarely stays confined to them.

Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory, said the result changes how the Observatory reads its own collaboration sub-score, "though not, it turns out, enough to stop us building on it."

On the strength of the estimate, the Adaptive Metrics Lab and the Review Cadence Observatory have jointly adopted the ten-desk partition as standing practice across every floor the University occupies or advises, whether or not the local fire code actually requires one at that headcount.

The full paper is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.su7mf0.