Ever been driving along a busy road with the traffic flowing along nicely and then for no apparent reason and with no obvious obstacles or changes in road conditions it starts to jam up? We’ve all been there.
Believe it or not these types of traffic jams have a name – shockwave jams – referring to how one driver slowing slightly can cause a ‘shockwave’ behind them of other drivers slowing down slightly more in response. The shockwave travels fast and as other drivers slow it eventually causes enough impact to stop the traffic entirely.
You can see an example of how these shockwave jams form in this experiment shown in the video below (it’s a somewhat poor quality film but bear with it). Japanese researchers instructed twenty-two drivers to drive around in a circle at the same speed (30 kph), and maintain the same amount of space between them and the car in front. It didn’t take long before traffic waves formed.
As I watched this it occurred to me that this is somewhat similar to how process jams form in organisations that are trying to get stuff done. With multiple people or teams involved that all need to act in a coordinated way it can be easy for one person or team to miss something, or not pay enough attention to what’s needed, or to misundersand what the objective is (for whatever reason).
When this happens it can create its own shockwave jam that ripples through other people and teams as they slow down and adjust. Amplify this across many teams working right across an organisation and it’s easy to see how hard it can be to get stuff done. There’s no easy solution to this but I guess the more that is done up front to align teams, clarify objectives and responsibilities, and raise awareness of the knock-on impact of a glitch in progress.
Lean manufacturing practice has some interesting techniques for actively removing waste from processes and identifying inefficiencies as well. The so-called ‘8 types of waste‘ for example, refer to activities which consume time and resources but which don’t add value. These are sometimes articulated with the acronym DOWNTIME: Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Non-utilized talent, Transportation, Inventory, Motion, and Extra-processing. Beyond these specific inefficiencies there’s a useful principle here about everyone taking responsibility at all times for identifying non-value adding activities or things which may get in the way of progress.
The original Japanese experiment is featured in the video above but you can also see how these ‘phantom jams’ form from this BBC footage. And if you want to get even more geeky about it, this four minute film below looks at the causes of shockwave jams but also what can stop them from happening. The big lesson here is about situational awareness, maintaining equilibrium and respecting other road users – once again some good principles for avoiding shockwave jams in businesses.
One final thing on this – the video below makes a fascinating point about self-driving cars and how they can improve coordination and regulate flow (by always maintaining the same distance with the car in front) in ways that help ensure that these phantom jams never happen. Which I guess is a lesson about how AI and automation might help alleviate at least some of these problems both on the road and in organisations.
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Photo by Victor Sánchez Berruezo on Unsplash
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