What Everyone Said
How you find out what a group thinks, when the only thing you can collect is what individuals say, one at a time.
How this page works
This page asks you to commit before it shows you anything. There are five decisions. At each one you pick an answer, and only then does the page tell you what your answer buys and what it costs. Nothing below the decision you are on exists yet.
You can change any answer at any time. Changing one clears every answer below it, because those parts were written for a choice you have since withdrawn, and leaving them on screen would be dishonest.
Every control says out loud what it does. There is no score and nothing is hidden.
2001
The census asked everyone in England and Wales what their religion was, and left a box underneath for anybody whose answer was not on the list. 390,127 people wrote Jedi.
The Office for National Statistics had seen the campaign coming and had prepared for it. Jedi Knight was given its own processing code, number 896, so the answers could be coded automatically instead of by hand. ONS was careful about what that meant: a code records that an answer was common, and confers nothing else.
Then the figures had to be published, and a published table has categories. Jedi went into No religion.
Years later somebody asked ONS, under freedom of information, who had decided that. The answer:
There are no records of any formal decision to allocate responses of ‘Jedi Knight’ to the 2001 Census religion question to the output category ‘No religion’.
It had not gone to the advisory group. No user had asked for it. The people doing the coding had no guidance and did something. 390,127 people crossed from one side of the national religion headline to the other, and nobody’s name is on it.
So: suppose you have to find out what nine hundred people think. Not what any one of them thinks, which is easy, you ask them. What all of them think, as a single answer somebody could act on.
What do you actually do?
The specimen
Marchwood Housing manages about four thousand homes in the south of England and employs 912 people. In March it buys a tool that works like this. Instead of writing a sentence you build one: a subject, a verb chosen off a grid of tiles, and an object you type yourself. The bet is that sentences built this way can be counted and sentences typed freely cannot.
Priya Rahman schedules repairs. On a Tuesday in March she opens it, and the subject is already filled in, because the subject is always her. She looks at the grid, presses a tile, and types into the box:
She attends every one of those meetings. Three other people in her team also hate the Monday meeting. Tom skips it when he can get away with it. Sadia turns up and argues. Marcus turns up, says nothing, and goes home tired.
Hold those four. Everything after this happens to them.
Decision one
Marchwood’s chief executive has a suspicion that meetings are eating the place. She wants to know whether that is true, and she has 912 people who could tell her.
You want to know how this organisation feels about meetings. What do you do?