Hierarchical thinking traces a pattern onto reality, overpowering points to fit the tracing and discarding or attacking those points that do not fit the pattern; whereas, rhizomatic thinking allows the structure and pattern of reality to emerge through our interaction with and testing of reality, accepting all points as part of the pattern.
Metaphor for difference between career planning and actual life journeys
Walk with me while I tell you about a new study into the psychology of finding our way. The research has uncovered at least three mental strategies. When asked to plan ahead and describe the most efficient route between two locations, we apparently visualise connections between highly salient streets, which leads us to formulate a relatively longer route, with fewer turns. This is known as graph-based way-finding. But asked to actually walk between the same two points, we base our route more on direction, make more turns, take smaller streets, and navigate more efficiently, as ongoing feedback from the unfolding scene reminds us of short-cuts. This incremental approach is known as direction-based wayfinding. The third mental strategy is brought to bear when we give directions to a stranger, with reference made to the simplest possible route, with the fewest turns and passing the most salient landmarks.Christoph Hölscher at the University of Freiburg and his colleagues said this is the first time that anyone has shown "how different planning and navigation conditions lead to different wayfinding strategies". They asked dozens of participants to plan, describe and walk routes through Freiburg. All those involved were highly familiar with the city. Asked to describe the shortest possible route between two city locations, and then asked to walk the shortest possible route between those same two points, not a single participant followed the path they'd actually described.
"It is noteworthy that none of the participants adhered to the route they had described only minutes ago," the researchers said. "They discarded their previously made plan directly after getting perceptual feedback about spatial properties, and showed little sign of trying to pursue an action sequence that they had previously identified as their own best solution."
The new results undermine earlier claims that routes are generally planned entirely in advance. "In addition," the researchers said, "the results highlight the importance of sensory (visual) feedback from the environment for route planning."
_________________________________Hölscher, C., Tenbrink, T., and Wiener, J. (2011). Would you follow your own route description? Cognitive strategies in urban route planning. Cognition, 121 (2), 228-247 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.06.005
Further reading:
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the park where we play, there are nicely laid out concrete paths, leading from the swings to the picnic tables, from the castle to the soccer field, from the water fountain to the bridge, from here to there, from A to B.
And then there are the real paths, the dirt ones, the ones that shoot out from the concrete to connect where people really go, to memorialize the real actions of children playing, to acknowledge the real patterns of living, of human purpose, of some honest destination.
Last year, my friend Anita cut an article out of the L.A. Times for me, with a note: “I thought you might like this.” Indeed I did.
The article, Robert Finch’s “Purposefully straying from the path,” was about those paths people make when they cut across a grassy area instead of following the prescribed walkway—those dirt paths that take us where we really want to go.
In the business of landscape architects, it turns out that these impromptu, unofficial, renegade paths have a poetic, wonderful name. They’re called “desire lines”:
“…those well-worn ribbons of dirt that you see cutting across a patch of grass, often with nearby sidewalks ignored—particularly those that offer a less direct route. In winter, desire lines appear spontaneously as tramped down paths in the snow. I love that these paths are never perfectly straight. Instead, like a river, they meander this way and that, as if to prove that desire itself isn't linear and (literally, in this case) straightforward.” — wordspy.com
Some landscape architects actually design walkways to accommodate these emergent designs, tracking the usage by waiting to see where people prefer to go and then building their official paths there. (Would this create more unofficial paths, I wonder? Is the desire to be outside the lines, to forge our own path, so strong?) Desire lines indicate yearning, according to John La Plante, the chief traffic engineer for T. Y. Lin International, an engineering firm. Indeed they do. A yearning to go our own way, to forge through the brush of life, to make a new path, to ignore the concrete in lieu of the feel of our foot on real earth, to see the results of our own agency through space.
A paper by Carl Myhill examines how companies can be successful by focusing on the desire lines of their products and customers:
“Desire lines are an ultimate expression of human desire or natural purpose. An optimal way to design pathways in accordance with natural human behaviour, is to not design them at all. Simply plant grass seed and let the erosion inform you about where the paths needs to be.”
How hard this is! Don’t we know best? Aren’t we the experts? Shouldn’t we set the path in stone and have them follow us? Perhaps, my friend, the answer is no, no, a thousand times no.
Myhill poetically calls desire lines “the ultimate unbiased expression of natural human purpose—a perfect expression of natural purpose.” Natural human purpose. What is mine? Yours? Maybe if I look at the paths I’ve worn, over and over again, I’ll see that purpose show itself, like corn fields create patterns only when I’m flying over them. Perhaps it takes some distance to see that path; at the very least, it requires a different vantage point.
Marica Sevelj, a blogger from Wellington, New Zealand, goes further to explore if and how desire lines connect to learning:
“Desire lines are linked to urban planning…I immediately started thinking about how this might apply to learning and teaching… Is the curriculum itself an example of a desire line created by a group of experts who wholeheartedly believe this is what the learner needs to know, or is the curriculum an example of a concrete path which learners are expected to use but don't necessarily want to? Could we take this approach in learning? Would mayhem ensue if we just planted seeds and waited to see what happened?”
When we teach, whose desire line are we teaching to, following, demanding? Mine as teacher, or my students’, as learner? Am I willing to follow them?
As Sevelj notes, The Walking Project is extending the concept behind desire lines to uncover the stories those paths tell.
“The Walking Project uses the paths people make across vacant lots in Detroit and across fields in South Africa — desire lines — as springboards to explore the paths we walk and how they are formed through culture, geography, language, economics and love. It looks at how people make their own paths; how and why people’s paths cross; and how changing patterns of movement can alter perceptions, attitudes and lives.”
Paths crossing, creating patterns and another layer of complexity. This image (I imagine Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and that invisible thread that ties her to friends across London, snapping only when she jolts awake—or falls asleep, one forgets which, they are so alike) creates spider webs of connection, like so much emotional longitude and latitude, except more random, aren’t they? Or not. How insanely random and yet how right, all those paths I’ve crossed around the world, accidental juxtapositions—and yet paths I cannot imagine not having crossed, as if the crossing were the destiny. Patterns I can’t see because I’m not high enough, but there I am as part of it, believing I am forging a new way, but perhaps not. Feeling I am defining my human purpose, but perhaps tracing a pattern already lightly penciled in? Feeling the renegade, but truly just being my own real self—in what kind of world is that being deviant?
(Click each photo to enlarge) In the left photo, look at the curve in the road. You’ll see a thin sliver of footpath connecting the bend in the road to a concrete path that mirrors its curve. The barrier in the second photo was put in place to discourage that desire line. Now, people just walk around the barrier.
Several years ago, Peter Merholz wrote an illustrated essay that demonstrated how Berkeley tried to circumvent rather than accommodate desire lines it found on campus. Rather than allow a new pattern to remain and become an established purpose path, they created an oddly out-of-place metal barrier to keep people on the “real” path. As the second photo shows, people now just walk around the barrier. When the official path makes no sense to how we actually live or use a product, we create our own path; we won’t be thwarted. (Sometimes, though, it takes most of a lifetime to create that new, real path, our very one, our own, doesn’t it?)
When faced with a bird’s eye view of my own desire lines, measuring in quick paces the decisions I’ve made or not made, do I allow them to become the real path, or do I put up a concrete barrier to redirect myself back to the “official” road? And what is that process of creating our own path? What feelings does it entail, engender, cause?
As Finch said,
“Sometimes, following unknown paths, we find ourselves in a maze of growth, in failing light, unsure where we are, flailing through jungles of stiff, impenetrable shrubs and sharp briars in deceptively benign-looking woods. All at once we realize we are lost, unable to retrace our steps. Then, suddenly, we come out onto a paved highway, far from where we thought we were, feeling a gratefulness and a relief we are ashamed to acknowledge.
But sometimes, just sometimes, we come upon a new and unexpected clearing, a magical place unanticipated in our daily thoughts or even our dreams; and when we do, we are so amazed that we cease even to wonder whether we will be able to find our way back home, or, perchance, whether this might in fact be our new home.”
Why do we stray? Finch asks:
“What is it that urges us to create, or follow, desire lines in our own lives? To forgo or depart from the approved or laid-out tracks in our landscape? To stray not only from the straight and narrow, but often from the broad and winding as well—though taking such paths can, on occasion, lead to destructive conflagrations?”
What is it that has pushed me to create this new desire line in my life? More importantly, where is the new line headed? Or do I need to know that now?
~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~
Plant grass seed and see what the erosion tells you about where the path should be—where do you keep going? What path are you wearing bare? Take an aerial “photograph” of your desire lines; only with that perspective can we clearly see them.
Where are they coming from and where are they going? Or are these desire lines a representation of your real intention in life, a sturdy setting forth? What landscape are they crisscrossing? Why not make them the real route for your life, since you obviously yearn to go there?
Also, ask yourself the tough question: are those really desire lines, or am I just lazy, looking for the quickest way from here to there, not the real way? Are they just for convenience, or a real marking out in the world? Can I tell the difference between a shortcut and a desire line?
Make your own way. Blaze your own sure path. Find the ultimate expression of your human desire or natural purpose. Leave a trail.
My previous boss was good at reminding me that strategy is not an exercise to be performed once a year and put in a binder, but is what should guide the 10,000 small decisions made in a company every day. Every company, to be successful in the long-term needs to have a strategy, even if that strategy is to be alert and responsive to what comes its way. One of the problems with strategy is the abstractness of the concept. When I'm at a party, and I say I work on strategy people tend to be interested and intrigued, but naturally pretty clueless on what it means I actually do each day (so I usually say I design things instead). The standard way we understand abstract concepts is to map them to something physical using metaphor. You can see this in a good deal of the standard language we use to talk about (among others) business strategy, for example:I have come to understand other facets of Strategy As Wayfinding from my very concrete knowledge of hiking in the mountains (hiking gives you lots of time to think). It gives me another angle to get to grips with strategy.
- This company's really lost its way
- We need to follow our guiding star
- They have two very different paths ahead of them
- Our strategy enables us to get to our vision
- Britain's strategic direction
- The competitive landscape
If you think about it, planning a hiking trip is not so different from directing a business.
Goal Destination Resources Food and gear Motivation Energy The competitive landscape Map Teammates Fellow hikers Deadline Arrival time (e.g. before it gets dark) What you're working on Your next steps When we're out hiking I tend to do a lot of the navigating. It's not always intentional, I evidently have a need to know that we are, literally, on the right track to reach where we need to get to. As a result I have come to think of good wayfinding as needing three separate pieces of knowledge. If I am missing one of these then I start to worry.1. Do I know where to step next?
This first set of questions lead to clarity of execution. Everyone knows what they need to do now and it becomes a question of mind over matter to push yourself through it, or over it. If it's really obvious and we're not traveling fast we can even enjoy the scenery as we go.
- Is the next minute of hiking obvious to choose?
- Can I negotiate any obstacles immediately in front of me - rock faces, logs, or marsh?
- Can I see the trail right in front of me?
2. What nearby landmark are we headed to?
Knowing where the next five minutes of path are leading to ensures that I can enjoy each step to get there. It's a little like Flow: Where to step next is knowing what to do to move forward; and knowing the landmark you're headed to allows you to see if you're making the progress you need.
- This is about mid-term navigation - the next 5 minutes of hiking. Are we headed up to the top of the rocky outcrop, curving around it, or descending underneath it.
- Is the trail going to peter out in just a few minutes or stay clear?
- What is your next goal in the hike? Reach the lake, climb the ridge, cross the meadow?
3. Is this the right overall direction?
While you can be confident about near and mid-term navigation and be very much enjoying your hike, this one is the really crucial one. It's the one I got wrong on the day I proposed to my fiancee by clearly seeing a trail heading down from the cloud in Mt Snowdon and marching us down the wrong valley (fortunately she still said yes). In that case I could clearly see 'the' trail and even the trail a little further down in the cloud, but I had no confirmation that we were on the correct trail in the first place. This last one is also the innovator's dilemma one - it's following the route you know gets you to the top, and then another group finding a shorter and easier way to higher up the mountain by coming up the other side.
- Are we heading down the right valley?
- Should we be on the West side of the mountain or the East?
- Is this even the right mountain?
- Do we have time to hike this mountain or are we better off enjoying the lake before it gets dark?
We experienced the challenge of difficult mid-term wayfinding in Jonkershoek, South Africa
I have found that these same guidelines I use for wayfinding in the mountains help me think about strategy more clearly. I need to know:While it's nothing new to break up strategy into say, now, next, later, actions, I do find that the concreteness of wayfinding while hiking gives me more clarity about how these all fit together - plus, lots of first-hand experience to draw from. I haven't tried it yet, but maybe I'll risk saying strategy at the next party and start talking about hiking instead.
- The next steps - It should be clear what we are working on now
- The nearby landmark - It should be clear what our immediate (say, quarterly) goals are and that what we're working on will help us achieve them
- The right overall direction - are we on course to achieve our vision for the company
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This is the fifth in a series of thoughts about what I learned from 6 months traveling across Central America, Southeast Asia and South Africa.
As with the first two characteristics of the rhizome, connectivity and heterogeneity, Deleuze and Guattari group the last two together: cartography and decalcomania. I think they do this because both characteristics have to do with our attempts to create a structure for, or a network of pathways through, the rhizome. Perhaps a better way of saying this is that these two characteristics speak to the practical problem of orienting ourselves within a rhizomatic structure and negotiating avenues for navigating through the rhizome from wherever we happen to find ourselves.
The capitalismandschizophrenia.org website defines Deleuze-Guattarian cartography as "the method of mapping for orientation from any point of entry within a 'whole', rather than by the method of tracing that re-presents an a priori path, base structure or genetic axis." Decalcomania is a method of "forming through continuous negotiation with its context, constantly adapting by experimentation, thus performing a non-symmetrical active resistance against rigid organization and restriction." Hierarchical thinking traces a pattern onto reality, overpowering points to fit the tracing and discarding or attacking those points that do not fit the pattern; whereas, rhizomatic thinking allows the structure and pattern of reality to emerge through our interaction with and testing of reality, accepting all points as part of the pattern. Hierarchical thinking is painting by the numbers, by the pattern imposed on the page; whereas rhizomatic thinking is painting by pressing paint between two pieces of paper to see what pattern emerges from the interaction of the textures, shape, and porosity of the papers, the viscosity and colors of the paint, the pressure, firmness, and steadiness of the artists' hands or the blocks pressing the paper.Anyone who is part of an organization large enough to merit an organizational chart (a hierarchical tracing) is aware day-to-day of the functional differences between hierarchical tracings and rhizomatic mappings. To request IT support in the Purchasing Department, for instance, one could send a request up the Purchasing Department line to be approved by the department head and then over to the head of IT who would then push the request down to the IT Support group for response. Or one could pick up the phone and call ones friend in IT support and ask them to check your computer the next time they are in the building. The first course of action follows a hierarchical tracing, a pathway imposed on a collection of people by the logic of the organization's managers, while the second follows a rhizomatic mapping, a pathway that emerges from the asignifying rupture of friendship, a relational category that appears nowhere on anybody's organizational chart.
As Chuen-Ferng Koh says in Internet: Towards a Holistic Ontology: "Rhizomatic links … are formed through mapping—or active construction based on flexible and functional experimentation, requiring and capitalizing on feedback. The map is not an image from which reality is to be traced … or a blueprint whose workability has to be taken on faith; the map is never fixed, but a changing flux of adaptation and negotiation. It is intimately and mutually tied to all the other principles of the rhizome." The strategy of mapping as opposed to tracing makes explicit the connection of heterogenous points, the multiplicity of a point as a line or arc or intersection with various speeds and trajectories, and the asignifying rupture of any point from this line or arc to another line or arc in another rhizomatic structure.
How do we map a class rather than trace it? By following the flows and lines of the class participants beyond the boundaries of the classroom, or the flows and lines of the conversation beyond the boundaries of the course content. By inviting the class participants to create the syllabus, perhaps at the end of the class as a description of what each did in class rather than at the beginning as a prescription for what they will do.
How does the introduction of a social network into a classroom encourage mapping? As a rhizomatic structure, social networks connect students to people and information far beyond the small, hierarchical group called Keith Hamon's English 101, Section 32, Spring, 2010, with its little collection of readings, smattering of exercises and papers to write, its twenty-five registered students, and single instructor. When both the instructor and the students realize and accept that they are no longer corralled into a confined, hierarchical space, but that they are free to roam in the entire World Wide Web, then the tendrils and shoots of the class can extend to anyone, anywhat, anywhere. Points can proliferate. We can start from a multiplicity of points and pursue a multiplicity of points. We can wallow, or we can run. We can be here and jump there through asignifying ruptures that will challenge the identity, the signification, of the class.
We can follow our creativity and passions, or create them if they don't exist.
And especially for the writing classroom, this passion and creativity is most important. Over a career spanning thirty years, I have read more than my share of bland, vapid, mindless prose written merely to satisfy the requirements of an assignment—an assignment that I made, so I've no one to blame but myself. I really don't want to read anymore of that writing, so I am hopeful that the introduction of rhizomatic structure into the classroom may help connect me and my students to our passion and our creativity and to each other.
Don't worry, we won't post anything.
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