Judging Success.
Adapted from ‘the Wiki Man’ by Rory Sutherland.
Success and how, as a profession, we measure it is an interesting topic. Not the personal kind that makes us want to have the most connections on LinkedIn, but the kind that lets us all know whether collectively we are doing a good job.
Rory Sutherland (Vice Chairman of Ogilvy marketing agency) has suggested that rather than spending £5 billion on CTRL to reduce journey times between London and Paris by 30 minutes, we could have spent just 1/100th of this to cover the costs of employing top models to serve free champagne to passengers all the way there and all the way back again. The £4.95 billion saved would have covered over half the cost of the Olympics and Eurostar passengers would actually want the journey to last longer. But strangely this option never seems to have been considered. What this highlights is how different people judge success and value.
There is a danger that we, as a profession, could all be going home every evening, feeling the warm, fuzzy glow of another day in the service of a greater good, based on the false comfort provided by a bunch of abstract measures of success that only we value.
In London the current Mayor stated during his first term in office that he wanted to enhance the city’s streets. All very good. But one of his pledges to illustrate his commitment to this cause was that 60 kilometres of guardrailing would be removed by July 2010 (Highways magazine, 01/02 10). Seemingly with no justification as to why it shouldn’t be 59, 10 or 600 kilometres. Or why it shouldn’t just be all the guardrailing that was found to be unnecessary, whatever length that may be.
Cycle infrastructure is another area that classically seems to fall prey to rather abstract and meaningless measures of success. Many cities prove their commitment to cycling by proudly proclaiming how many miles of cycle lanes that they have introduced. But this is all for nothing if they don’t join up and every junction feels like a game of Russian roulette.
Part of this compulsion for loosely related but ultimately meaningless measurements comes from the inherent reassurance we get from numbers. The assumption is that numbers must automatically mean mathematical rigor. This leads to a human tendency, which seems particularly acute in traffic engineers, to only attach importance to those things that can be counted, graphed or summarised.
I am not against spreadsheets per se, in fact I think that the creativity often involved in a good piece of statistical analysis and the insight that it can offer is something very beautiful – I am, after all, an engineer. But much of the number crunching dictated by the planning process, including a great deal of traffic modelling, is often counter-productive for a place. The problem is that no-one wants to believe that all of those twinkling monitors could possibly be wrong.
This mindset also leads to a preference for making things more efficient over more pleasurable. I’m not so sure that those outside of our professional bubble necessarily share this belief quite so whole heartedly. We are fortunate enough in this country that a large proportion of us have a fairly high standard of living, to the point where the things that cause us concern are often pretty trivial. For example, the biggest cause of stress on my commute into work tends not to be the reliability or frequency of the service (which Network Rail are spending billions of pounds on to improve), but the rather more mundane matter of trying to coax the gate line at London Bridge to accept my ticket. The old fashioned gates that the London Underground use work wonderfully well, which only serves to highlight how poor the newer gates that Network Rail have bought really are.
In this respect people don’t necessarily have a great sense of proportion in these matters, often making mountains out of mole hills and vice versa. But the fact remains that this is the audience we are trying to please, and no amount of wishing for something different will change this.
Linked with this is our professions tendency to equate the value of something directly with how much it costs (the Eurostar example that I mentioned at the beginning is a case in point). Just the introduction of a simple wooden bench on a street can be worth many times more to someone than wall to wall Yorkstone paving. Similarly, you only have to look at the effect that a tree lined avenue has on property prices to see where most people’s preferences lie.
In many ways we are connoisseurs of transport. Like film buffs, we are in danger of falling over ourselves to eulogise about the equivalent of a black and white, subtitled art house film, when everyone else just wants to see a Hollywood blockbuster. We need to make sure that we don’t disappear up our own professional derrieres because, if we’re honest, we all like a good rom-com.
Rory Sutherland (Vice Chairman of Ogilvy marketing agency) has suggested that rather than spending £5 billion on CTRL to reduce journey times between London and Paris by 30 minutes, we could have spent just 1/100th of this to cover the costs of employing top models to serve free champagne to passengers all the way there and all the way back again. The £4.95 billion saved would have covered over half the cost of the Olympics and Eurostar passengers would actually want the journey to last longer. But strangely this option never seems to have been considered. What this highlights is how different people judge success and value.
There is a danger that we, as a profession, could all be going home every evening, feeling the warm, fuzzy glow of another day in the service of a greater good, based on the false comfort provided by a bunch of abstract measures of success that only we value.
In London the current Mayor stated during his first term in office that he wanted to enhance the city’s streets. All very good. But one of his pledges to illustrate his commitment to this cause was that 60 kilometres of guardrailing would be removed by July 2010 (Highways magazine, 01/02 10). Seemingly with no justification as to why it shouldn’t be 59, 10 or 600 kilometres. Or why it shouldn’t just be all the guardrailing that was found to be unnecessary, whatever length that may be.
Cycle infrastructure is another area that classically seems to fall prey to rather abstract and meaningless measures of success. Many cities prove their commitment to cycling by proudly proclaiming how many miles of cycle lanes that they have introduced. But this is all for nothing if they don’t join up and every junction feels like a game of Russian roulette.
Part of this compulsion for loosely related but ultimately meaningless measurements comes from the inherent reassurance we get from numbers. The assumption is that numbers must automatically mean mathematical rigor. This leads to a human tendency, which seems particularly acute in traffic engineers, to only attach importance to those things that can be counted, graphed or summarised.
I am not against spreadsheets per se, in fact I think that the creativity often involved in a good piece of statistical analysis and the insight that it can offer is something very beautiful – I am, after all, an engineer. But much of the number crunching dictated by the planning process, including a great deal of traffic modelling, is often counter-productive for a place. The problem is that no-one wants to believe that all of those twinkling monitors could possibly be wrong.
This mindset also leads to a preference for making things more efficient over more pleasurable. I’m not so sure that those outside of our professional bubble necessarily share this belief quite so whole heartedly. We are fortunate enough in this country that a large proportion of us have a fairly high standard of living, to the point where the things that cause us concern are often pretty trivial. For example, the biggest cause of stress on my commute into work tends not to be the reliability or frequency of the service (which Network Rail are spending billions of pounds on to improve), but the rather more mundane matter of trying to coax the gate line at London Bridge to accept my ticket. The old fashioned gates that the London Underground use work wonderfully well, which only serves to highlight how poor the newer gates that Network Rail have bought really are.
In this respect people don’t necessarily have a great sense of proportion in these matters, often making mountains out of mole hills and vice versa. But the fact remains that this is the audience we are trying to please, and no amount of wishing for something different will change this.
Linked with this is our professions tendency to equate the value of something directly with how much it costs (the Eurostar example that I mentioned at the beginning is a case in point). Just the introduction of a simple wooden bench on a street can be worth many times more to someone than wall to wall Yorkstone paving. Similarly, you only have to look at the effect that a tree lined avenue has on property prices to see where most people’s preferences lie.
In many ways we are connoisseurs of transport. Like film buffs, we are in danger of falling over ourselves to eulogise about the equivalent of a black and white, subtitled art house film, when everyone else just wants to see a Hollywood blockbuster. We need to make sure that we don’t disappear up our own professional derrieres because, if we’re honest, we all like a good rom-com.
