Post by Chris_Wendt on Mar 23, 2011 14:09:27 GMT -5
Sudoku, a Japanese iteration of a game invented by an American in the late seventies has only been around since the 1980’s. I discovered Sudoku at this time last year when my daughter brought me a book of Sudoku puzzles to help pass the hours recuperating in St. Francis Hospital. I learned how to solve progressively more difficult puzzles, discovering a variety of algorithms for deducing placement of missing numbers.
After I returned to work and resumed taking the LIRR in September, I found Sudoku in the morning paper, and was usually able to leisurely solve each day’s puzzle by the time I reached Penn Station.
More recently, I found Sudoku online and started playing on my PC. There, online, came my Sudoku epiphany. Each time I solved a Sudoku, the computer displayed my time, along with a Laffer curve (“Bell” curve) showing how I performed against the rest of the online Sudoku-playing universe. The news was not good. I was coming in around 20 minutes, which put me in the 1st or 2nd percentile (98%-99% of players were faster than me)! The Laffer curve peaked at 7 minutes, compared to my crappy 20 minutes. I imagined a group of Asian teenagers blasting through Sudoku puzzles in Queens and Tokyo, Mumbai, Seoul, and Shanghai, all laughing at my performance, three times slower than theirs.
That’s when it hit me. I had been following all the rules and using all the algorithms in meticulous fashion, solving these puzzles down to the nth degree, checking and double checking my work as I went, and using little glyphs I created to help me muddle through. When I solved a Sudoku, it was solved right, and it was solved well…but it took me three times too long to get the job done! I needed to change my approach: totally new attack skills were needed to radically improve my lackluster performance.
So how to get from 20 minutes to 7 minutes? All attempts to run through algorithms faster were futile. I could get down to 17 or 18 minutes, but frequently encountered dead-ends and unsolved puzzles. Then I remembered those lightning chess games in Bryant Park: the Slam! Bam! Thank you, ma’am…style of lightning chess, where those kids stripped the board down to un-winnable levels, and then one of them won, anyway. What was the secret? Could that secret be applied to Sudoku to radically cut down my solve time without sacrificing accuracy?
Epiphany means revelation. It was knowing the predetermined outcome, focusing on the entire puzzle all at once, altogether, expanding my mind’s eye to conceptualize all 81 squares organically, so that every single move interfered with the chaos level of the whole matrix, reducing it systematically, and very rapidly. This morning I solved a Sudoku under five minutes, less than a quarter of the time I had previously required before I challenged myself to improve.
Now to relate this to the school budget process.
1. Pre-determine the outcome. All Sudoku puzzles have a predetermined outcome, and it is very simple to recognize; reach the predetermined outcome, puzzle solved, pencil down, no further work to be done. The Levittown School Board used to budget in a similar fashion, giving the Superintendent the predetermined outcome (target budget or tax increase percentage), and then let the Superintendent do all the work to solve the puzzle, returning to the school board with an essentially finished work. “Here’s that 2% tax levy you wanted!”
2. Know and follow the rules; understand the algorithms. At the policy-making level of the school board the rules are very simple:
a. cut spending commensurate with revenue cuts
b. appropriate fund balance to keep taxes in check, but only after making necessary spending cuts, first.
At the Senior Administrative level, the rules are arcane, complex and technical. But dealing with and managing within a complex of arcane rules is why senior administrators get the big bucks. Top administrators need to better understand that the school board owns the budget, as Rule One.
At the operational level, those administrators need to become better soldiers, learning to hew closer to the mission, to embrace the spending reduction objectives set at the policy-making level and being implemented by the senior administrators. Rule One for these people is to get a handle on zero-basing their departmental budgets, and Rule Two is to forget about “use it or lose” budgeting; look at the last years’ spend before you look foolish as a budget maker. Rule Three is to never mind what any other department or building is doing or asking for or getting; pay attention to your own shop, and do the best budget you are able to do for your own codes.
3. Conceptualize the big picture. Stop splintering the process and trying to horse-trade among hundreds of budget codes attempting to avoid the inevitable. In Sudoku, if you get all the eights solved but can’t straighten out the threes, then you’ve lost it, and wasted a lot of time doing so. Refer to #1, above: it is so vital for the school board to nail down the outcome, up front, thus avoiding having to negotiate with a herd of sacred cows, mystic goats, and sacrificial lambs at every turn along the way, going late, late into the process, only to get bogged down again and again.
What we can’t have are sixteen managers with sixteen various approaches to 16 different parts of the whole school budget operating in an un-timed budgeting environment without clear-cut rules and a clearly articulated objective and then expect to arrive at a proper budget. What we actually have is, unfortunately, exactly what I just said we cannot have. Fix that. Now. Apply some much needed pressure to stop the bleeding. Before it is too late.
Chris Wendt
After I returned to work and resumed taking the LIRR in September, I found Sudoku in the morning paper, and was usually able to leisurely solve each day’s puzzle by the time I reached Penn Station.
More recently, I found Sudoku online and started playing on my PC. There, online, came my Sudoku epiphany. Each time I solved a Sudoku, the computer displayed my time, along with a Laffer curve (“Bell” curve) showing how I performed against the rest of the online Sudoku-playing universe. The news was not good. I was coming in around 20 minutes, which put me in the 1st or 2nd percentile (98%-99% of players were faster than me)! The Laffer curve peaked at 7 minutes, compared to my crappy 20 minutes. I imagined a group of Asian teenagers blasting through Sudoku puzzles in Queens and Tokyo, Mumbai, Seoul, and Shanghai, all laughing at my performance, three times slower than theirs.
That’s when it hit me. I had been following all the rules and using all the algorithms in meticulous fashion, solving these puzzles down to the nth degree, checking and double checking my work as I went, and using little glyphs I created to help me muddle through. When I solved a Sudoku, it was solved right, and it was solved well…but it took me three times too long to get the job done! I needed to change my approach: totally new attack skills were needed to radically improve my lackluster performance.
So how to get from 20 minutes to 7 minutes? All attempts to run through algorithms faster were futile. I could get down to 17 or 18 minutes, but frequently encountered dead-ends and unsolved puzzles. Then I remembered those lightning chess games in Bryant Park: the Slam! Bam! Thank you, ma’am…style of lightning chess, where those kids stripped the board down to un-winnable levels, and then one of them won, anyway. What was the secret? Could that secret be applied to Sudoku to radically cut down my solve time without sacrificing accuracy?
Epiphany means revelation. It was knowing the predetermined outcome, focusing on the entire puzzle all at once, altogether, expanding my mind’s eye to conceptualize all 81 squares organically, so that every single move interfered with the chaos level of the whole matrix, reducing it systematically, and very rapidly. This morning I solved a Sudoku under five minutes, less than a quarter of the time I had previously required before I challenged myself to improve.
Now to relate this to the school budget process.
1. Pre-determine the outcome. All Sudoku puzzles have a predetermined outcome, and it is very simple to recognize; reach the predetermined outcome, puzzle solved, pencil down, no further work to be done. The Levittown School Board used to budget in a similar fashion, giving the Superintendent the predetermined outcome (target budget or tax increase percentage), and then let the Superintendent do all the work to solve the puzzle, returning to the school board with an essentially finished work. “Here’s that 2% tax levy you wanted!”
2. Know and follow the rules; understand the algorithms. At the policy-making level of the school board the rules are very simple:
a. cut spending commensurate with revenue cuts
b. appropriate fund balance to keep taxes in check, but only after making necessary spending cuts, first.
At the Senior Administrative level, the rules are arcane, complex and technical. But dealing with and managing within a complex of arcane rules is why senior administrators get the big bucks. Top administrators need to better understand that the school board owns the budget, as Rule One.
At the operational level, those administrators need to become better soldiers, learning to hew closer to the mission, to embrace the spending reduction objectives set at the policy-making level and being implemented by the senior administrators. Rule One for these people is to get a handle on zero-basing their departmental budgets, and Rule Two is to forget about “use it or lose” budgeting; look at the last years’ spend before you look foolish as a budget maker. Rule Three is to never mind what any other department or building is doing or asking for or getting; pay attention to your own shop, and do the best budget you are able to do for your own codes.
3. Conceptualize the big picture. Stop splintering the process and trying to horse-trade among hundreds of budget codes attempting to avoid the inevitable. In Sudoku, if you get all the eights solved but can’t straighten out the threes, then you’ve lost it, and wasted a lot of time doing so. Refer to #1, above: it is so vital for the school board to nail down the outcome, up front, thus avoiding having to negotiate with a herd of sacred cows, mystic goats, and sacrificial lambs at every turn along the way, going late, late into the process, only to get bogged down again and again.
What we can’t have are sixteen managers with sixteen various approaches to 16 different parts of the whole school budget operating in an un-timed budgeting environment without clear-cut rules and a clearly articulated objective and then expect to arrive at a proper budget. What we actually have is, unfortunately, exactly what I just said we cannot have. Fix that. Now. Apply some much needed pressure to stop the bleeding. Before it is too late.
Chris Wendt
