Leadership Lessons from Sodoku

I’ve been starting to enjoy Sodoku over the past few weeks. The Calgary Herald newspaper has one each day that I’ve been using to practice my skills and logistical arrangements. And I am realizing there’s a lot of Leadership Lessons to be learned from Sodoku.

1) Don’t be afraid to do the simple, obvious things first. It seems to me that leaders often want to do something flashy and impressive, especially in the early days of a new position. But the best thing to do in Sodoku is just to start filling in the simple, obvious numbers that follow the rules of the game. That’s probably a good principle for starting in leadership too. (K.I.S.S. still applies!)

2) One piece of the puzzle affects all the others. Sodoku is essentially a domino-effect game. If one number goes here, then another number can or cannot go there. But the key to Sodoku - and to leadership - is to realize that every “answer” in one space affects how the other “answers” fit in the whole/big picture. Which leads to the next leadership principle...

3) One false assumption can cause significant problems. Once you get past the obvious stuff, making an “educated guess” or “assumption” is risky. And if you make the wrong one, it can really lead to significant trouble for two reasons. Most obviously, the false assumption will lead to other "answers" not fitting in the puzzle. And as you try to re-arrange or re-organize the other "answers" based upon your false assumption, lots of other "answers" start to also get messed up. Even worse is the fact that the false assumption may actually not show up for quite a while and you may work away on the rest of the puzzle with no evidence that your assumption was not in fact correct until the very end – and then you have a big problem that is almost impossible to backtrack and undo. (And so I look at the Sodoku answer key, find out where I got messed up, and shake my head. Not so easy to do in real life and leadership). Especially as it relates to personnel decisions, a poor hire can influence a whole department/division and it may be months before one realizes the person who is the real source of confusion in an area, and then there can be lots of human, financial, and organizational damage to be repaired.

So… I’ll keep developing my Sodoku skills, and hopefully move cautiously though steadily through various leadership challenges.