Is your decision making process stuck in heavy traffic?

I conducted a piece of research two years ago asking mid-level managers how they spent their time at work.  The single biggest category of activity, taking 38% of the working week, was meetings with peers. No surprise here, you might think; forty years of research, going all the way back to Henry Mintzberg in the 1970s, has shown similar findings.   And yet, this is still a phenomenon that merits attention.  Even with all the improvements in information-sharing brought about with technology, we still spend inordinate amounts of time in meetings. The research study showed that meeting with colleagues were also rated as very low in value.

It is fairly easy to understand what the problem is: large organisations have multiple external stakeholders and have many interlinked activities and functions, and it takes a lot of effort to coordinate and align the interests of all these different parties.  In many cases, there is also a consensus-oriented culture, where great effort is made to be responsive to all concerns.  We have all been in large meetings, with maybe fifteen or twenty well-intentioned and thoughtful people, where we have ended up in gridlock.

There must be a better way, and sometimes it is worth seeking inspiration from unusual places. One interesting possibility is the world of city planning and traffic management. Alongside never-ending meetings, getting stuck in heavy traffic is right up there as a big time-waster in our working week.  Over the last fifteen years or so, there have been some creative experiments in traffic management that have helped alleviate the worst congestion problems. These experiments have very interesting implications for the world of management.

Speed up the flow

One approach cities have taken up is to simply improve the throughput of people by nudging them towards more efficient modes of transport.  This means, basically, reducing the number of cars with single passengers. I live in London, where there is now a congestion charge on people driving in the city during the working week, a low-cost cycle scheme, and a vastly improved subway, trains and bus network. Other approaches include heavy taxes on vehicle ownership (Singapore), restrictions on use at certain times (Bogota), incentives to give up driving (Murcia in Spain) and cable cars (Medellin, Colombia). Ride-sharing businesses such as Zipcar are also helping to reduce the number of cars in big cities. 

Simplify the rules

A more radical approach is to rethink the traffic-flow system entirely. Whenever accidents occur in cities, the authorities typically respond by creating even more rigid rules to govern the flow of traffic. A little-known Dutch road traffic engineer, Hans Monderman, had the bright idea in the late 1990s that they should do the exact opposite – to fight complexity with simplicity. He persuaded a few municipal authorities in Dutch towns, such as Drachten, to take out the roundabouts and traffic lights and replace them with “shared space” paved areas where the cars, cyclists and pedestrians were free to work their way through busy intersections as they saw fit. Careful analysis was done before and after these shared space areas were created, and sure enough the simpler model worked better. Car drivers were respectful of cyclists and pedestrians, people adjusted to each other’s behaviour, and the flow of traffic through these busy intersections actually improved.

Rethink the pathways

A third approach some cities have explored is to rethink the nodes and pathways in the traffic system, with the insight that “less” is sometimes “more”.  There was a famous case in 1990 where 42nd Street in New York was shut down for repair work. Everyone predicted the city would grind to a halt, but paradoxically the traffic flowed better while 42nd street was out of action.   This is known as Braess’ paradox, after the German engineer Dietrich Braess who first noticed that increasing capacity in a road system can (under specific conditions) actually slow things down, because people cluster around the shortest route, thereby making it slower for all.  When 42nd Street was closed, people took different routes through less-congested parts of town, and of course some drivers opted to take other forms of transport, while a few chose not to make the journey at all.

Braess’ paradox has been observed in several cities, from Boston to Seoul, and it is a stark reminder that more roads doesn’t necessarily equate to faster flow of traffic.  Interestingly, there are now technological solutions to Braess’ paradox as well.  For example GoogleMaps uses a piece of software called Waze, which shows real-time congestion levels based on iPhone / GPS data, thereby helping smart drivers to take the round-about routes.

Making smarter decisions

Ponder these three categories – do these apply to the world of decision making in large companies?  Yes of course they do. It doesn’t take much imagination to play out the metaphor:  you can think of your committees and decision-making bodies as the network of roads in the city; your rules and governance protocols as the one-way-systems and traffic lights that regulate flow; and the agenda items, the specific things you need to make decisions on, as the people trying to get to their destinations.  The metaphor instantly offers us some interesting possibilities.  

For example: 

#1 Speed up the flow

How can you make your decision-making processes more efficient?   Most firms have already automated their procedures to a good degree, which is the equivalent of forcing people to use a mass-transit system rather than drive everywhere in their own cars.  By using standardised processes, it is possible to increase the flow dramatically, as long as there is also a way for unusual decisions to be managed on an exceptional basis. 

#2 Simplify the rules

Most firms have highly sophisticated processes for budgeting, performance management, expense claims and so forth. But like the complex rules governing traffic flow at busy intersections, these are almost always over-engineered.  So try taking a leaf out of Hans Monderman’s book – simplify the rules, push decision-making down to those closer to the front line, and rely on the common sense of your people to do the right thing. I have seen versions of this happening in many companies: for example, the Beyond Budgeting Movement is all about simplifying internal budgeting processes, while the Agile movement in software development is built on pushing responsibility for development to those doing the work, rather than leaving it to a central planning team.

#3 Rethink the pathways

Dietrich Braess was fascinated by the idea that fewer roads could result in speedier traffic flow. His ideas have  also been applied to the world of sports – research has shown, for example, that when a basketball team loses a star player they can actually end up playing better, in part because they utilize a more diverse set of passing strategies, rather than always relying on the star.  The analogy to the workplace is obvious – when a senior manager goes on leave for a month, there is often a dramatic increase in how quickly things happen.  Freed of the bottleneck of everything going through the boss, people figure out alternative pathways, or they start to make more decisions themselves. 

Note that points #2 and #3 are subtly different– one is about the rules governing how decisions are made, the other is about the actual flow of those decisions through the organizational network.  But in truth, the details don’t matter that much because we are dealing with a metaphor here.  Getting your head around the world of city planning is simply a creative technique to help you think afresh about the sclerotic decision making processes you are trying to overcome. 

So next time you are sitting in a large committee, and you are feeling as stuck as a taxi driver at Piccadilly Circus or in Times Square, think about some of these ideas.   These are not problems you ever completely solve –cites will always be congested, large firms will always have too many meetings – but by applying some creative thinking you can make good progress.