Congestion leads to inefficiency and system failure but does extra capacity restore circulation?

CorporateNature No 149

Congestion leads to inefficiency and failure but it takes systemic measures to unclog gridlocked streets.

1) CONGESTED FRIDGE

If you overfill your fridge, you would struggle to find inside it the food you are looking for. A congested fridge also means that every time you open it, you would have to keep the door open for longer and thus waste energy. And so it goes, until one day you start exploring the source of the bad smell and find a rotten head of broccoli at the back of the bottom shelf. 

2) CONGESTED BODY

If you regularly overeat, excess fat builds up in your arteries, putting increasingly more stress on your cardio-vascular system. Soon something as simple as climbing up the stairs requires a strenuous effort. While the body is sturdy, congestion eventually catches up until one day the heart has had enough. 

3) CONGESTED CITY

If you overfill a city, it becomes not only inefficient but also unwelcoming. Neighbourhoods become overpopulated and polluted, main roads become a time-consuming nightmare to navigate, parks become stressful instead of relaxing. Eventually, the city stagnates economically and degrades culturally until one day people decide to move elsewhere.

4) CAN EXTRA CAPACITY RESTORE CIRCULATION?

In each of these cases, congestion is clearly undesirable. To unclog the system, it often helps to increase circulation capacity:

A) Blood thinning drugs make the five litres of blood run more smoothly around your body.

B) Some 37% of the area of Manhattan is taken up by streets, while aisles take up 75% of the store area of Walmart supermarkets.

Yet, if the anti-congestion measures are not applied in a systemic way, stopgap patches may fail. Hence one of the favourite jokes of stuck-in-traffic Americans is that building more highway lanes to mitigate traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to fight obesity.

Traffic jam in Delhi (image source: Wikipedia) 

Without flow, lakes turn into swamps; Without development, cities become ruins

CorporateNature No 148

If water stops flowing, it turns into a swamp.

If a city stops developing, it turns into ruins.

Both of these "end states" have their role in nature and society: swamps are important habitats for wetland species; while ruins can evolve into tourism hubs or degenerate into quarries for construction material. 

Neither of these would ever be completely still: there will be movement in the swamp when a frog or a bird disturbs the surface; and tourists will shuffle around the columns and arches of city ruins. Yet, these disturbances do not equal progression in a determined direction, as in when a river flows and a living city develops.

Roman ruins (image source: Wikipedia)

It is easiest to find a job if you already have a job

CorporateNature No 147

When you go to a restaurant, would you prefer to order your dish and wait for it to be cooked, or would you say to the waiter “Bring me something quick! If nothing is available, give me whatever leftovers you have from other tables!”

This is the difference between hiring somebody who currently has a job (and you may have to wait for three months for them to join you) and hiring someone who is currently unemployed. Employers play safe and constantly look for endorsement by other employers that a candidate is skilled and work-focused enough to be able to stick around in a job.

What should an unemployed job seeker do then? A possible shortcut is setting up your own company while looking for a job. A successful startup may come out of this, but even if  it doesn't (most likely), at least there would be a filler on your CV to plug the gap.

Leftovers (image source: Wikipedia)

A city is a self-organising system, similar to a flock of starlings

CorporateNature No 146 

Self-organising systems of a feather flock together.

Ever wondered how starlings coordinate perfectly with each other to create flocks of such beautiful shapes? The driving principle is that of self-organising systems.

A flock of starlings is a self-organising system where each bird interacts with a fixed number of its neighbours. When a bird reacts to an external stimulus (a gust of wind or an approaching predator) by changing its direction of flight, this triggers an immediate response from its neighbours, which in turn triggers the other neighbours in a chain reaction. Very quickly, the initial response becomes an avalanche-like reaction of the whole flock. So, what looks like a masterfully choreographed dance is nothing more than well-organised chaos.

Chaos theory describes the elements of a self-organising system as “islands of predictability in a sea of chaotic unpredictability”. In a flock of starlings, each bird is an “island of predictability”, while what the flock will do next is the sea of “chaotic unpredictability”.

Just like a flock of birds, a city can be viewed as a self-organising system. The “islands of predictability” in a city are the individual people and the social norms they live by. The “sea of unpredictability” is the way in which the whole city develops over time. Examples of such developments are:

- the gentrification of some neighbourhoods (but not of others);

- the clustering of ethnic minorities in some parts of the city (e.g. Chinatowns, Little Italy, etc.);

- the decline and disappearance of entire cities in history.

A flock of birds (image source: Wikipedia)