Planning Sustainable Transport

Chapter 11

Sensing success and failure

Objectives

All behaviour is driven by motives of some sort or another. Motives may be quite simple and vague, almost unconscious. Watching a young child playing is intriguing – repeated attempts are made to put things inside or on top of one another. There is clearly a task to be achieved, and the child learns how to do it by repeated trials, errors and corrections. That can only work if there is a memory of the motive, of what has been done and of what the outcomes were, something which we and other animals do instinctively and unconsciously. Cyberneticists term the process ‘error-actuated feedback’.

In Chapter 3 such trial and error was likened to steerage, first setting an objective and then defining ...