STOP, Give Way

As an Englishman in New York I am occasionally asked if I found it difficult to learn to drive on the opposite side of the road to that which I grew up with. My American friends ask me about driving on the right side of the road, and my British friends of course ask me about driving on the wrong side of the road. Driving on the wrong side of the road is easier when the steering wheel is on the right side of the car, by which I mean the left hand side of the car, if you follow me. It means you just keep yourself close to the line down the middle of the road and away from the curb. Driving a British car with the steering on the right hand side but on the wrong side of the road, in France for example, is much trickier.??

In any event, I am ambidextrous. I don't think that actually has anything to do with what side of the road you are driving on but it amused me to say it and that's what counts.??

The harder thing for thing for me to adapt to were the Stop signs. In Britain we have very few stop signs. Most of our junctions are governed by Give Way signs which are the equivalent of a Yield sign here in America. How this manifests is that if you are cruising along a long lonely road and you can see clearly that nothing is coming along the road you are joining then you can carry on cruising. You certainly do not have to come to a complete one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi stop. When I first moved here that shift resulted in me doing some almighty emergency stops in the middle of the night on deserted roads when I realized almost too late that I was approaching a Stop sign.???

In Britain we do not have the concept of a four way stop junction. Generally one road would be the "main" road with the right of way, and the other roads joining it would be regulated by Give Way signs. This could occasionally mean that you were trapped for a long time in the side road waiting for a gap in the traffic. But of course Britain does love its roundabouts (traffic circles) especially mini-roundabouts as a way of giving people a better shot at moving on. American four way stops signs can lead to some trepidation if more than one car arrives at almost the same time, but generally it leads to better alternating traffic flow for those minor junctions.?

It struck me the other day that this Stop/Give Way dichotomy speaks to a deeper cultural difference than might first appear. The Give Way sign puts the onus on the driver. It says "on your judgement be it that you have to stop for oncoming traffic". The Stop sign says "you will stop regardless of the circumstances". I remember a number of years ago a previous CFO friend of mine making the distinction between US and UK tax accounting principles. In the UK the accountant had to sign off the annual statement that to the best of their professional opinion the statements were accurate and reasonable. In the US? it was more that the statements had to comply with the letter of the law. This was particularly at the time of the Enron scandal which at the time straddled the legal/not-legal boundaries of the objective letter of the laws of US accounting but would probably have failed the subjective opinion basis of UK accounting laws. There is an entirely subjective feeling I have formed that the America is more comfortable with black and white situations and Europe is more at home to shades of grey and the nuance.?

In our daily work there is the ever present cost of context switching. The myth is that multi-tasking is possible. You can in truth probably handle the juggling of many topics if you are handling your email inbox, or light admin type stuff, but to do deep thinking, concentrated kind of work then you need to get your brain into the "zone". Once you are in the zone any interruption that breaks you out of the zone is going to incur a context switching penalty. Context switching is what it takes to surface from one deep pool of thought to pick up a different thread or activity. I only really have experience of being in the zone for programming, but I can tell you that you spend a long time constructing a veritable mind palace of variables and logic states as you code and solve the problems you encounter. You can document your code, you can take notes, you can write wikis, but nothing replaces having it all hovering in your mind's eye. I know of no other way to code effectively. Interruptions bring that crashing down like an ice palace in a heat wave. I would imagine that any other line of work has similar Zone states whether it is writing a novel or dismantling a transmission. What you need in the Zone are Give Way junctions. You want to limit Stop signs to major obstacles or key decision points.?

In leading our own teams how often are we using Stop signs and how often are they Give Ways? A micro manager will place an abundance of Stop signs in the paths of their employees. Every single fork in the road will have a Stop sign to slow down progress and require consultation with the manager. Give Way junctions puts more trust in the team member, it is still incumbent on them to pause to consider their actions and choices, but once they have looked in both directions and their way is clear then they should proceed. For major forks in the road then it is appropriate to have a Stop sign, or even full on traffic lights to force a temporary halt to make the right choices. You need a mix of both. A network of roads with no signs at all is a recipe for chaos (although there is some evidence it can be a good thing). Leadership is perhaps about establishing a map of the highways, routes, and side roads with the types of junction that will be the most effective and efficient. A safe but continuous flow of productivity is what we all want. Trust your people so that at the right places you can safely Give Way.?