Remove the phantom traffic jams from your organisation!

About a month ago together with my lovely wife, we were coming back from the Agile on the Beach conference. And while I enjoyed the conference, this post is not about it, it is about the phantom traffic jam that we found on our way back to Auckland.

Somewhere near Bombay, suddenly the traffic started to slow down and eventually we had to stop and from this moment the traffic became annoyingly slow. We expected some road works or an accident ahead of us that could have caused the jam. However, when the traffic started to speed up again we could not see anything even remotely indicating the reason for the slow down. So what happened? Well, we experienced a phantom traffic jam, probably caused by a distracted driver who made other vehicles break, these vehicles caused other vehicles to break, and the wave of stopping cars started. According to research, these waves can travel with the speed of 20km/h and when this wave hits you, you may be many kilometres from the initial cause of the jam.

This is how Tom Metcalfe from Live Science describes this phenomenon:

… phantom traffic jams are an emergent property of the flow of vehicles down a highway. A phantom jam begins when a car in dense traffic slows down even slightly, which causes the car behind that vehicle to slow even more — and the slowing action spreads backwards through the lane of traffic like a wave, getting worse the farther it spreads.

To see how it happens, look at this short video:

OK, but what does it mean to organisations and teams? Think for a while how value flows through your company? Usually, there are multiple parties involved, the work flows through multiple people, teams and departments, like cars on the motorway. And your team may be high performing, like a sport car with an amazing engine, however, as soon as some other team (car) slows the flow down, the whole work dramatically slows down and may even stop. And often your team does not have the visibility of what is going on there. So what do you do? You just start a new task and you stop worrying about the stopped work. Or like many teams, you mark this piece of work as blocked, on your Kanban board and you move on. But would you just stop on the motorway and not try to move forward? Or would you jump into another car standing next to you? You could, but remember that this car is on the same motorway, it is part of the same flow. Changing cars will not help you get home faster, the same way how changing work won’t help you deliver value quicker to your clients. You need to optimise the flow of your work.

Some sources say that:

phantom jams could save at least some of the estimated $121 billion per year

Think about what it could mean to your company? What is the cost of all the work that is stopped and blocked?

Is there a solution for the phantom traffic jams? Apparently, there is. Normally drivers worry only about the car in from of them and they adjust their speed based on the behaviour of the driver in the front. Similarly how we focus on moving our work to the next team. This means that as soon as something ahead of us stops, the wave of stopping cars (work) starts. One of the solutions is called bilateral control. In bilateral control technique you take into account the car ahead of you and the one behind you, and if all the cars follow the same technique the speed can be well adjusted and the average speed on the motorway will improve. Have a look at this simulation:

What does bilateral control mean for the work we do? What if we could not only push the work forward but also look back and adjust our processes to help the team behind us? This way we could optimise the whole flow of the work, we could avoid the work jams and we could increase the average speed of value delivery to our clients. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Next time you see a blocked work ask yourself (and your team) what we could do about it? But more importantly, ask if you are a reason of blocked work for other teams and how you could work better together to remove the blockers and improve the flow of work. How could we get home faster and how we could deliver value to our customer faster?