The University's new strategic plan assigns every delegated authority to a painted floor line and sends decisions taken close to one across it for a second look.
A strategic plan drawn from food-truck pitches either side of a council centreline
Two trucks sell much the same lunch a few metres apart, and the trade on either side of a painted line is not the same. That observation, drawn from a service road where two council areas meet, is the premise of the University’s Strategic Plan 2026-2031, released today as Over the Line, Under Review.
The School of Emergent Priorities, through Mr Halvard Nnamani with Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist and Dr Marek Solheim, compared pitches across the centreline and found that waiting, takings and card use stepped at the paint and did not step again further along the kerb.
We kept looking for the gradient and the road would not give us one.
— Mr Halvard Nnamani, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities
The plan carries that finding into the University’s own offices. Each delegated authority is assigned to a Delegation Line on the floor from which it is exercised. A signature is given with both feet on the registered side, before a witness who stands on neither, and a decision taken within one pitch-width of a line is read by a second signatory on the far side before it takes effect. No exception is sustained for longer than a single review cycle, and a line found to be misplaced stands where it was painted until its scheduled review.
The plan also commits the University to matched pitches on both sides of any council line it trades near, allocated by lot, and to observing the study roads each quarter and leaving them as found. Associate Professor Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies, said the plan “puts the line somewhere a person can walk to,” and Dr Solheim, Deputy Convenor of the Horizon Register, said the School was “glad to have been standing in the right place.”
The full plan is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.lymuhx.