Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself

by Mike Michalowicz

A 2009 study by the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, confirmed that people trying to find their way through a forest or a desert devoid of landmarks (and without the sun as a beacon) tend to walk in circles. People walked in circles as tight as sixty-six feet while thinking they were walking perfectly straight. That is like putting a blindfold on and trying to walk across a football field, the short way, one sideline to the other, and never making it across. Researchers concluded that in the absence of clear markers of distance and direction, we make a continuous stream of micro adjustments to what we think is straight, but those adjustments are biased to one side more than the other. Our constantly changing sense of what is straight keeps us walking in a loop. We circle and circle, ultimately perishing, when we could have easily gotten out of the weeds by just walking straight. You can overcome this tendency if you have a distinct landmark to move toward, and if you are lucky enough to be equipped with a compass or GPS. The distinct and distant landmark allows us to constantly recalibrate our direction and stay straight. Even when an obstacle presents itself, we can avoid it, move around it, or run from it, and then again spot our landmark and use it to correct our