Leading for Organisational Change

Chapter 14Simplicity

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times.

Thomas Merton¹

There is a town in The Netherlands that has no traffic lights. Twenty years ago, Drachten, home to 50,000 people, was a pioneer town in a project known as Shared Space, the brainchild of a traffic planner, Hans Monderman, in which all traffic lights and other signs, road markings and ‘street furniture’ were removed. Since then, cars, cyclists and pedestrians have indeed shared their space, road deaths have reduced dramatically, and tailbacks and congestion are almost non-existent. It is a model which has since been replicated, or at least experimented with, in other towns and cities across the world, and while it is not without its challenges and detractors, the results are startling and contain important lessons for us that extend far beyond traffic planning.

Look at what Monderman said when interviewed in The Daily Telegraph, seven years into the project:²

‘We want small accidents, in order to prevent serious ones in which people get hurt,’ he said …

‘It works well because it is dangerous, which is exactly what we want. But it shifts the emphasis away from the Government taking the risk, to the driver being responsible for his or her own risk.’

Monderman then goes on to compare his traffic planning philosophy ...