Mike Lyons explains flow in physical systems using everyday examples: HOV lanes speed highway traffic, a Japanese garden uses entry tokens to limit visitors, and grocery express lanes move smaller batches faster. Simple constraints and design choices control how things move.
So it's five o', clock, you just get off work, you're jumping your car and you start to head home and you hit the highway at the same time as everybody else who just got off work. What happens to freeways, to highways, when you put more and more and more and more cars on them? Well, they slow down, right? We get traffic. Well, there's ways to manage the flow of traffic on a highway, isn't there? You might be familiar with things like the high occupancy vehicle lane or HOV lane. You know, this is the sort of, if you have two or more people in your car, you've got a lane reserved for you and you can move over to that lane and you get to go through the traffic faster. It's a way of increasing flow, the flow of traffic. Maybe there's toll lanes. Perhaps you've been on a toll road. That's another way of increasing flow. If people aren't willing to pay the toll, they don't get to use the lane. Traffic patterns are a very common place where you see flow thought about and techniques used to manage flow. But it's not just traffic. There's a botanical gardens in Japan that uses a very low tech solution to managing flow within their botanical gardens. They pass out a small token as people enter the botanical gardens and they've figured out the right number of people in the garden that flow and walking around and enjoying the garden is maximized. And so as they hand these tokens out, as people arrive when they're out of tokens, that's the number of people that can be in the park. And the rest of the people have to wait to get in until somebody leaves and then they give them the token back. The token goes back in the bucket. And now, okay, well, three people have left. So three people can come in. The botanical gardens have, have under. They understand and the leadership there has figured out how to maximize flow through the botanical gardens. One, one more example that, that to sort of demonstrate the idea of managing flow is at the, at the grocery store. Maybe you've, you've filled your basket up with 12 items or less at the grocery store. What, what lane do you hit to check out? Here in the US we sometimes call them the express lane. 12 items or less because we know that a smaller batch of work goes through a system faster. So your, your checkout lines with smaller batches are typically faster than the larger batch items. My family will, will joke sometimes before we check out. I'm looking at all the lines and I'm not necessarily looking for the shortest checkout line. I'm looking for the line that has the. The smallest batches. So I may choose a line that has more people, but I see they have less items because I know smaller batches go through systems faster.
