Traffic congestion is one of the biggest blights on modern society.

One of the biggest hindrances to the smooth flow of traffic occurs when different roads meet. Traffic junctions represent a classic contradiction situation, the most frequent solutions to which involve combinations of underpasses, overpasses, roundabouts and traffic-lights.

In countries like France, the UK and Australia, the roundabout has emerged as one of the preferred solutions. Most likely because the solution is much cheaper than the other options, but also because it offers a degree of self-organisation. Every driver approaching the roundabout, in other words, decides for themselves when it is safe for them to enter into the flow of traffic around the roundabout. Like other solutions, the roundabout works up to a certain point, but once traffic exceds a certain threshold density, systems can still easily end up in the kind of gridlock illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Roundabout operating beyond capacity

When traffic levels have reached this state, none of the existing solutions are able to cope. The instinct of most traffic planners when faced with this kind of problem is to either hold up their hands in defeat, or – if the level of public complaint exceeds a mayoral panic level – to try and design a ‘better’ control system.

In the conventional way of looking at the world, ‘better’ typically means adding more lights or more traffic control police to the system. Unfortunately, what both of these directions fail to comprehend is that traffic flow is a complex system and as such is unlikely to be beneficially affected by top-down control methods. Try and command-and-control a complex system, in other words, and the only guaranteed outcome is that the net effect on the system will be that it is worse after you’ve finished tampering. ‘Tampering’ here means the kind of control nightmare illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Nightmare vision of ‘Command-and-Control’ traffic light system

Not only would such a system (the illustration is actually a piece of street art rather than a real design) be extremely frustrating for drivers, but it would be practically impossible to ‘optimize’, albeit precisely the kind of crackpot challenge that some designers will feel compelled to take on. The Figure 2 illustration, real or otherwise, makes for an excellent illustration of what systems look like when they hit their inevitale point of maximum viable complexity. When these extremes are reached, it is – or should be – a sign that what is required is a completely different solution to the problem.

And lest one or two readers of this article maybe not so interested in the vagaries of global traffic flow, exactly the same model applies to government regulation. Or the law. Or software engineers coding control systems. Solving a problem in a system by adding more lines of code, or another law or regulation is exactly analogous to adding another traffic light to the Figure 2 picture: It is the wrong direction.

Put another way, the system has hit a limit that requires the resolution of a contradiction in order to progress. The Systematic Innovation methodology recognizes the importance of finding and solving contradictions and as such has now analysed and codified close to 3.5 million examples from across all walks of life. One of the big findings of this research is that people in very different industries all tend to solve their contradictions in similar ways. Up until recently, the traffic industry had collectively failed to resolve the traffic-lighted, traffic-policed roundabout problem, but when abstracted into a more general form of the problem – we wish to increase the flow of a ‘something’ and the complexity of controlling the system becomes too great, then many people in other industries have had to create inventive solutions. Figure 3 describes how we might map the key traffic roundabout conflict onto the Contradiction Matrix tool built around our millions of datapoints:

Figure 3: Key traffic congestion conflict

The output from the Contradiction Matrix is a list of Inventive Strategies or Pricniples. In the case of this problem, it is perhaps interesting to note the presence, in fourth place priority order, of Principle 25, ‘Self-Service’. What this is telling us is that other people in similar situations have successfully been able to create a self-organising solution. To an extent, though, the roundabout is already an example of such a self-organising system. With this in mind, it is a reminder that perhaps now is the time to examine some of the other Principles being recommended.

The presence of Principle 13, ‘The Other Way Around’ is also an interesting one. If only because, solutions that successfully utilize this strategy tend to give quite significant jumps. At first the thought of turning our roundabout around the other way doesn’t appear to offer much hope for practical application. What could we possibly turn around? Make the roundabout move? Turn the roundabout upside down? Make the traffic go around it the other way? Certainly none of these strikes one as being particularly clever.

One of the main things we should always try and keep in mind whenever we are using any of the contradiction-breaking solution direction triggers is to write the ideas down no matter how ridiculous they might sound. Based on our experiences in problem solving sessions, this is often the most difficult thing to try and get delegates to do. Even after they have been given instructions like ‘you must write down at least 50 ideas’, it is still a rare group indeed that will hit the target. The problem is that we are inclined to evaluate ideas almost as soon as we think about them, and if they don’t then sound immediately sensible, we assume that they are ‘wrong’. Almost inevitably, this premature rejection will turn out to be a big mistake.

Far better is that we write the ideas down anyway. Making traffic go around the roundabout the wrong way, for example, may well not work as a solution by itself, but it may work if we are able to combine it with another solution. Even if that other solution also, by itself, doesn’t sound like it is particularly sensible. Like for example, taking the idea of Segmentation (Principle 1 – the first strategy recommended by the Matrix for our traffic conflict pairs) and dreaming up the idea of turning one roundabout into many, doesn’t sound either like it will do much to help the problem.

Now take a look at the ‘solution’ illustrated in Figure 4:

Figure 4: ‘Magic Roundabout’

Traffic Congestion Reduction Solution

Well, if nothing else, this strange looking design does offer a good illustration of a segmented roundabout. Also one that has used ‘Local Quality’ by making different roundabouts different sizes. Less obviously, this so-called ‘magic roundabout’ has also made use of the aforementioned ‘other way around’ strategy. It has done so because it allows motorists to go around the big roundabout ‘the wrong way’.

The rules of the road – for those of us that drive on the correct (left) side at least – tell us that we must travel clockwise around a roundabout. The problem with this rule is that if the clockwise route around the roundabout is full of traffic, we have no alternative but to sit patiently and wait. This can be particularly frustrating. Especially if the anti-clockwise route is not blocked. The magic roundabout solution concept, therefore, presents a solution to this problem. It does so because any driver is now allowed to go around the big roundabout anti-clockwise. They can do this while still following the must-go-clockwise rule because they still go clockwise around the mini-roundabouts.

The first instinct of most people when they see the roundabout-of-roundabouts idea is to think ‘thank goodness I don’t have to navigate my way through that’. Indeed driving up to a magic roundabout for the first time can often look like other motorists are moving somewhat randomly – as illustrated in Figure 5:

Figure 5: You want me to drive through this??

After the first time through, though, drivers quickly realize that this solution is a very big improvement on the standard roundabout that it replaces. Traffic flows much more freely around a magic roundabout very simply because, not only does every driver decide for themselves when they enter the roundabout, they can now also decide which is the least congested pathway around the big roundabout – clockwise or anti-clockwise – and now take that route.

So successful has the ‘magic roundabout’ design been in the UK – combining as it does the beautiful self-organisation capability and being very cheap to create (essentially removing all traffic lights and controls, and instead painting a few markings on the road surface) – that the first pilot one has been replicated in several other towns and locations where a number of roads have unavoidably been forced to come together.

The case represents – when comparing figures 2 and 4 – an elegant illustration of the differences between top-down, command-and-control versus self-organisation as solution strategies. The former becomes increasingly cumbersome as complexity increases, while the latter delegates the solution, bottom-up, to every element within the system. It also represents, we think, another pair of important thoughts relevant to just about any ideation session:

1. The importance of writing down ideas irrespective of how dumb they might sound initially. The magic roundabout idea only works through a combination of multiple strategies, any one of which by itself would have made the system worse.

2. Even after a ‘solution’ has been proposed it may well still not look immediately ‘obvious’, merely because it is so far away from where we are today. It often takes a very brave person to stand up and defend these kinds of solutions if they are to have any chance of being given the opportunity to prove themselves. Can you imagine, for example, being the traffic planner who first dreamt up the magic roundabout idea and having to justify the design to your peers? To your boss? To the local authority that has to implement and justify the solution to the local inhabitants that will have to use the system?

And that ultimately is the overriding thought to take away from this article. Someone had to be very very brave in order to even allow this idea to be given a hearing. In many ways it is amazing that it ever reached the drawing board, never mind an actual demonstration.

The ‘breakthrough’ solution all too often bears all the hallmarks of the magic roundabout: it doesn’t fit the current common sense. Common sense for traffic planners says, ‘add more lights’. No-one is going to lose their job for doing that. ‘Take out all the lights, paint the lines on the road, then disappear without telling people what you’ve done (*)’ is the opposite of common sense. And a clear step in the direction of ‘you’re fired’ should something – anything – go wrong… especially in a time of organizational down-sizing like the one we find ourselves in again.

(*) this is exactly what was done with the first magic roundabout. Again, an‘anti-common-sense’ idea that turned out to have some very important logic behind it. Give people instructions about how to use something and you’ve just sent a clear message that it must be complicated; don’t give them instructions and, hey, it must be easy. Even more importantly, what the conceivers of the magic roundabout also knew was that adding more rules and controls onto the road does nothing to improve road safety. The road might get safer in theory, but we all drive worse in practice. The automotive industry lives this horrible paradox on a continual basis: cars get safer (‘common sense’) and we all compensate by driving more recklessly, so that traffic injury and death statistics stay pretty much the same. The ‘non-common-sense’, but breakthrough solution is take away the safety features so that drivers have to drive more safely. My friends at Ford have a saying that the only car safety feature that would ever work would be a sharp, pointed metal spike sticking out of the steering wheel and pointing at the driver’s chest. Drive home thinking about that spike tonight, and you will now drive very safely. It is exactly this logic (another example of Principle 13 in fact) that makes the magic roundabout one of the safest forms of traffic control on the road. Yet again, though, this kind of solution only gets a hearing because someone has to stand up and break the common sense.

Innovation fortune most definitely favours the brave. And then, of course, as time progresses, the broken-common-sense becomes the new common sense (see for example the spreading decision of traffic planners to remove all forms of traffic light from towns around the UK). But then, of course, when this happens, and everyone is doing it, the financial reward tends to zero.

Innovation is fundamentally – fundamentally – about breaking rules. Breaking rules in turn demands copious amounts of thinking-the-unthinkable. And therefore even great amounts of bravery.