Risk Creates Engagement

In fact, the chaos associated with traffic in developing countries is becoming all the rage among a new wave of traffic engineers in mainland Europe and, more recently, in the United Kingdom. It’s called “second generation” traffic calming, a combination of traffic engineering and urban design that also draws heavily on the fields of behavioral psychology and—of all subjects—evolutionary biology. Rejecting the idea of separating people from vehicular traffic, it’s a concept that privileges multiplicity over homogeneity, disorder over order, and intrigue over certainty.

“One of the characteristics of a shared environment is that it appears chaotic, it appears very complex, and it demands a strong level of having your wits about you,” says U.K. traffic and urban design consultant Ben Hamilton-Baillie, speaking from his home in Bristol. “The history of traffic engineering is the effort to rationalize what appeared to be chaos,” he says. “Today, we have a better understanding that chaos can be productive.”

Drivers [in regulated areas with many signals] find themselves enclosed by a corset of prescriptions, so that they develop a kind of tunnel vision: They’re constantly in search of their own advantage, and their good manners go out the window.

The new traffic model’s advocates believe the only way out of this vicious circle is to give drivers more liberty and encourage them to take responsibility for themselves.

[At Netflix] there’s no vacation policy, and the travel and expense policy is literally five words: “Act in Netflix’s best interests.” Netflix believes high-performance people should be free to make decisions, and those decisions need to be grounded in context.

In the world of Netflix, flexibility in the long term is more important than efficiency. To inhibit the chaos that too much flexibility in a large organization can create, hire (and keep) only high-performance people. High-performance people make great decisions, which are better than rote rules.

These two stories highlight the advantages of focusing process improvement on “diamonds and arrows”—i.e., making better decisions. Project leaders who focus exclusively on the “boxes and arrows” of workflow action improvement will often find themselves caught up fixing yesterday’s operations and systems issues.

Ripping up the playground rulebook is having incredible effects on children at an Auckland school.

Chaos may reign at Swanson Primary School with children climbing trees, riding skateboards, and playing bullrush during playtime, but surprisingly the students don’t cause bedlam, the principal Bruce McLachlan says. The school is actually seeing a drop in bullying, serious injuries, and vandalism, while concentration levels in class are increasing.

“When you look at our playground it looks chaotic,” says McLachlan. “From an adult’s perspective, it looks like kids might get hurt, but they don’t.”

Swanson School signed up to the study by AUT and Otago University just over two years ago, with the aim of encouraging active play. However, the school took the experiment a step further by abandoning the rules completely, much to the horror of some teachers at the time.

When the university study wrapped up at the end of last year, the school and researchers were amazed by the results.

Mudslides, skateboarding, bullrush, and tree climbing kept the children so occupied the school no longer needed a timeout area or as many teachers on patrol. Instead of a playground, children used their imagination to play in a “loose parts pit” which contained junk such as wood, tires, and an old fire hose.

“The kids were motivated, busy, and engaged,” says McLachlan. “It was expected the children would be more active, but researchers were amazed by all the behavioral pay-offs.”

AUT professor of public health Grant Schofield, who worked on the research project, urged other schools to embrace risk-taking. “It’s a no brainer,” says Schofield. “As far as implementation, it’s a zero-cost game in most cases. All you’re doing is abandoning rules.”

Society’s obsession with protecting children ignores the benefits of risk-taking, Schofield says.

Children develop the frontal lobe of their brain when taking risks, meaning they work out consequences. “You can’t teach them that,” says Schofield. “They have to learn risk on their own terms. It doesn’t develop by watching TV, they have to get out there.”