by John Brooker | Mar 25, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 85 If you rely too much on standardisation, what do you do when you want to differentiate or when the market changes…? “Civilizations in decline are consistently characterised by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.” Arnold Toynbee, British Historian Are you standardised? I have a new woman in my life. She recently helped me navigate across Europe and apart from a brief dispute, (she sent me via a Munich traffic jam when my intuition said to go via Innsbruck) we had few cross words. The children call her Mrs T. (from Tom Tom) and my wife blesses her for saving arguments over map reading. Yes, we have a satellite navigation (sat nav) system in the car and I’m really impressed with its accuracy (most of the time), the way it reduces the stress of navigating and its ease of use. However, one day when pulling out of a hotel in France, I noticed that Mrs T. had me turn right, drive up around a roundabout (traffic circle) and back past the hotel again, when it was perfectly legal and quicker to have pulled out left from the hotel. I noticed two other cars behind me do the same thing and wondered if lots of people buy satellite navigation, will we see more of this behaviour as people use the standard “best route” and forget how to read a map and the road? I envisage thousands of motorists converging on the same location along the same route at the same time, in starling-like swarms. [For videos of starlings swarming, click here, they are very impressive.]...
