The other way

Here is a nice story. Eurostar is a train service between London and Paris. Those of you who have taken it will agree with me that it’s not particularly nice. Crowded and dirty waiting room, uncomfortable seats, overpriced food. But it’s still far better than flying, which has all these bad things, plus the fact that you will leave much bigger carbon footprints. Anyway, a few year ago, some engineers tried to think of a way to improve the Eurostar. After some considerations, they decided to spend 6 billion pounds on building new tracks from London to the channel. The result: a reduction of 4.5 minutes from the journey.

Is that the only solution to the problem?

When telling this story, Rory Sutherland, an advertising guru, said, “Call me Mr. Picky, but isn’t it a slightly unimaginative way of trying to improve a train journey by merely making it shorter?” What’s his suggestion? What about using the 6 billion pounds to employ the world’s most beautiful male and female super models to walk along the length of the train, handing out free Champagne? “You’ll still have about 3 billion pounds left in change,” he said, “and people will ask for the train to be slow down!”

“Unimaginative ways of getting things done” is a common disease in Hong Kong. If some Martians landed in Hong Kong and see the way people here behave, they would probably think that there is a competition in Hong Kong for doing things in the most boring, unoriginal ways.

Let’s take an example. Like many people to study and work at CityU, I use the MTR (the Hong Kong subway system) everyday. The university campus is connected to a shopping mall, which is connected to the MTR station. (Don’t ask why our university is linked to a shopping mall. We don’t know. Like many things in Hong Kong, “it happens somehow”.) Anyway, to go from the subway station to the mall, you have to walk through a short passage. Some time last year, the subway company hired some young people, lined them up along the middle of the passage.

What were they doing? Their job was to tell people to walk on the right side of the corridor. If everyone uses the right side of the passage, then the people walking in opposite directions will not run into each other.

So, these young people, in bright uniforms, lined up in the middle, chanting slogans about walking on your right, and if they saw anyone trying to walk on the “illegal” side, they came to you and politely took you to your side. Brilliant idea.

These people were there for one month. During this month, everyone walked on the right side (we were pretty much not permitted to do otherwise). What happens after this month? Predictably, we fell back to our habits, walking any side we like. So, the lasting effect of this one-month campaign is: zero. This inability of sustaining a forced order indicates that whoever came up this idea has no understanding of human behaviour.

But this is not the true problem. Every morning at 8.30 am, most of the people were walking in one direction – from the subway station to the university – and every day at 7 pm, the direction is reversed. But these young people, having been told to stand in the middle and steer people to the “right” track, forced everyone to use only the right side. Instead of making people’s lives easier, they made a narrow tunnel even narrower, and slowed everyone down.

These young people were told to do something. They did it. They followed their instructions to the words, with devotion that would impress even the Singaporean. They probably didn’t understand the reasons behind their instructions (to help circulating people in peak hours). Or they did understand, they just dared not change the instructions. They dared not make mistakes.

The true problem is the level of inflexibility  in the mind of these young people.

Why? Is it because original behaviours are not rewarded in our schools? Is it because our school teachers are too good at pointing out to their children what they do wrong, and never tell them what they do right?

Think about this. Throughout our education system, students are graded by a system based on the deduction of marks. In this system, there exists a perfect, ideal model (100 marks), and we are all compared to that model. Our grades are decided by how much we are inferior to this model standard. I get 84 marks, and the girl sitting next to me gets 91 marks. There are two implications from this result. One, she is somehow better than me. Two, neither of us are perfect.

There are huge problems with these implications. How many times in reality have you encounter a problem that has a single, perfect solution? When two people come up with two different ways of solving a problem, why must one solution be right, the other is wrong (or, one is less wrong than the other)? Why can’t they both be right to some extent, and by collaborating, they can come up with the third, better, solution together? By punishing children who do not come up with the pre-determined answers, we are sending them two dangerous signals: that there is only one acceptable solution in any situation in the world, and that you will be punished if you don’t follow the rule.

I believe that these two signals are destroying our future.

Since the first day of school, we were told days after days, by some highly paid professionals (= teachers), what kinds of mistakes we made, how far (or how close) we were from the “model”. Gradually, we lose our originality. We become super-good at pointing out mistakes, trouble shooting, studying and summarising past experiences, criticising people and avoiding mistakes. We are no longer able to create something  - imperfect but original – completely new.

Back to our subway story. Imagine this situation. You are the manager of a station. In your station, there is an escalator and a stairs. Of course, most people use the escalator. Your boss tells you to increase the number of people taking the stairs. What will you do.

You may hire some young people to stand next to the escalator and politely ask people not to use it, and take the stairs instead. You may block the escalator altogether.

Or you may do this:

Advertisement