A School of Continuous Improvement brochure reports a null result for a community pool's lanes-left booking banner, and the pool's roster has adopted a standing order to keep it as found.
A season of alternating weeks leaves the banner in place, and the lane roster commits to the same trial every season.
Every morning a community pool’s booking app tells its swimmers that only two lanes remain, and until this season nobody had asked the banner what it was for. A brochure from the School of Continuous Improvement, published today, reports that for the span between a booking and its session it is for nothing in particular: weeks with the banner and weeks without it drew the same lead time.
The work was led by Doctoral Candidate Edda Nwafor with Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor of the Living Dashboard, and Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer. The team alternated the banner on and off across a full season, left the lanes and the front-desk routine untouched, and set the two kinds of week side by side.
Each Monday the banner was either there or it was not, and the swimmers carried on exactly as they always had.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard
The pool’s lane roster has since adopted a standing order under which the banner stays as it was found and the same trial is run again each season to the same protocol. Dr Adeyemi said the protocol sheet was “the shortest document the front desk has ever been handed, and the only one that asks nothing of anybody at six in the morning.”
The result joins six published studies of everyday signs, scores and screens that the brochure sets out for readers. The University regards a plainly reported null as a good thing to hold in a folder, and is glad to see a pool keep one.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.wb4xdn.