Kurukshetra or Fairfax?

Driving, in my humble opinion is where people’s behavior is displayed in full abundance in the raw. Cocooned in a 4-6 ton machine with the safety of Detroit (or Japanese or German or …) steel all around you, you are lulled into some false sense of superiority where society’s civil behavioral norms no longer become a constraint! And particularly if you are in a Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) – a synonym for mindless behemoth with a ridership of one - this feeling of invincibility and power gets magnified several times over.

Watching people’s driving habits is an interesting exercise and helps calm the frustration and desperation that takes over when traffic slows down or comes to a halt. I find constant sources of inspiration for my thoughts and endless curiosity in my observations on my daily drive to work through the roads of Fairfax County in Virginia.

Unlike in India, where there is no recognition of lanes, and the progress of cars down the road is akin to the path of the chariots of fighting warriors in the Mahabharata on the plains of Kurukshetra, driving in America, for the most part is an orderly exercise with occasional bouts of brinkmanship and displays of human anger, frustration or timidity.

One observation that has piqued my curiosity, at least in the battlefields of Fairfax County, is how close people can get to the white line that marks the boundary of a lane before a traffic light. This line is the hard limit drawn by the traffic police to prevent encroachment of a car into the intersection area with another road that crosses the lane (“the Box”). I have been observing who tends to stop just before, well before, exactly at the line, or way in front of the line (jutting into the intersection). But the analysis of age of driver, ethnicity, type of vehicle, is fodder for another day’s blog.

Today my observation was that when the first person approaching the line stops ahead of the line, cars in other lanes also cross the line and stop abreast of the first car. The reverse also seems to work. If the first car approaching the red light stops just short of the line, so do all the others. And in this lies a lesson. Most human beings tend to be followers of both “right things” and “wrong things”. And the first person to do something (anything) generally sets the pattern for the rest. And the general breakdown of order is triggered by that “first person” doing the “wrong thing”.

The first person to ignore the stalled traffic in a traffic jam and mount his vehicle on to the shoulder of the road to pass the people patiently waiting in lane, is the trigger for others who were waiting for that first one to break through. Soon there is an army of vehicles straddling the shoulder trying to gain competitive advantage - in hot pursuit of that lead car. The difference between New York City and Fairfax County appears to be that in New York that first person (natural leader?) is quicker to emerge.

The same holds true for cell-phone use. For some inexplicable reason, the State of Virginia allows use of cell-phones while driving (its neighbors Washington DC and Maryland don’t). So when you see a driver chatting away on his cell phone, waving with the other hand and cocking his head at an angle to catch all the nuances of the conversation du jour, your first urge is to pick up your own cell phone and make that very urgent call that was not so urgent twenty seconds ago. Soon you have a cluster of vehicles on the road with all the drivers on their cell-phones making calls they had no intentions of making a minute earlier.

I have noticed the “follow the lead” phenomenon in my own home. When we are all tidied up, my family members tend to keep dishes away, clean the table and countertop, throw garbage where it belongs, make their beds, keep away the magazines and books and toss their discarded clothes into the laundry hamper. But if the house is already untidy, they tend to care less about what they do with their own things, generally contributing to added untidiness.

So the lesson of the day for enterprise architects is – keep your architecture tidy, well managed and well-arranged, and all new contributions will fit neatly into a bigger picture that is at once easy to understand and brief, easy to extend and at all times looks tidy and well constructed. Let go of order and entropy increases very quickly. Watch for that first person who starts the explosion of entropy increase and deal with him/her firmly to prevent a lemming like migration to the dark side.

The emergence of a few natural leaders is actually a good thing for the enterprise, but when everyone in the crowd wants to become a natural leader, anarchy is the result.