A School of Continuous Improvement brochure profiles CUSP, its method for finding the cutoffs already sorting community life in two, and the raffle that inspired it.
CUSP names the cutoffs already sorting community life in two, starting with the minute a raffle's early-bird window closes
Slop University has published a case for CUSP, the School of Continuous Improvement’s Cutoff Utilisation Studies Programme, and the brochure opens exactly where the method did: the minute a suburban club raffle’s early-bird ticket window closes.
The School describes the brochure as the clearest public account yet of a method it has been quietly applying to committee eligibility, waiting lists, and audition scores for several years.
A cutoff doesn’t announce itself. Somebody just stops selling early-bird tickets, and from that second on, two different raffles are running side by side without anyone noticing.
— Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, School of Continuous Improvement
CUSP treats a raffle’s early-bird deadline the way it treats a committee’s years-of-membership threshold or a choir’s audition score: as a line the world has already drawn, waiting to be read on both sides at once. Clubs that adopt the programme’s findings do not merely learn something about their raffle; they commit to holding every future cutoff at the exact minute the analysis calls optimal, whatever time felt convenient on the night.
“The method doesn’t care what the cutoff is for,” said Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor of the Impact Pathway Atlas, “only that ordinary community life is full of them, waiting to be read.”
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.l8n8e1.