Work Traffic Snakes
This YouTube video, titled “The Simple Solution to Traffic,” helped me think through a common dynamic within big organizations.
The problem of traffic is not about frequent accidents or “bad drivers.” It’s about a lack of coordination among drivers on the road.
When a driver slows down too much, or someone cuts him off and forces him to slam on his brakes, all the drivers behind them must slow down as well. Not only that, but every subsequent driver will typically slow down more than the previous one because of human reaction times and a desire to maintain following distance. This means the slowdown effect travels back like a wave, even forcing drivers to come to a full stop at times. A phantom traffic jam, or a “traffic snake,” occurs.
I believe this is what’s happening within big organizations and why so many people with full-time roles only work for a fraction of that time. When you have a large, uncoordinated group of people working together on projects but independently performing parts of those projects, a slowdown of one person can lead to a standstill for others. They experience a work traffic snake.
For example, say a project lead delays getting client approval. The project manager, who assigns work, is “slowed down” waiting for approval, which brings the rest of the team to a stop. If this same delay happens much further up the leadership hierarchy across many teams, a big work traffic snake begins. This also helps explain why some companies push their people to “move fast,” even without a project-specific need.