Life is negotiation. It is about what we ‘want’. And about other parties that want something different. Ultimately, therefore, negotiation is about contradictions.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the course of the last three years thinking about negotiation. Probably in no small part because it feels like I’ve spent the majority of this time watching the still-spiralling out of control debacle that is Brexit. The rising sense of horror that no-one in the negotiation – on either side – appears to be armed with even a modicum of creativity. Admittedly, of course, the EU side of the negotiation, having the upper hand throughout, haven’t had to be too creative, but even so, in public they have always talked about matters in terms of lose-lose, and how their primary job has been to minimise the losses on the EU side.

On the UK side, cemented by the Panorama documentary last night, the negotiating skills come across as misguided at best, and pitiful at their very frequent worst.

Ultimately, I’ve been left with the question, does no-one know how to negotiate any more?

Last week I started reading Chris Voss’s book, ‘Never Split The Difference’. And unusually for any kind of book I read these days, it gave me an ‘aha’ moment. Voss’s book represents something of a step-change in the world of negotiation. All of the negotiation ‘classics’ prior to his book – think all-time classic ‘Getting To Yes’ by Ury & Fisher – are built on the premise that the parties involved in a negotiation are thinking rationally, and that negotiation therefore ultimately comes down to ‘problem-solving’. Voss’s innovation is an acknowledgement that negotiations are instead dominated by our ‘system 1’ emotional brain. People negotiate for two reasons, a good reason and a real reason, to paraphrase an aphorism we use a lot in Systematic Innovation world.

Voss’s book ultimately comes down to recognising the importance of our ABC-M model when it comes to thinking about what each party in a negotiation is looking to achieve. Its one of those blinding flashes of the obvious that has somehow taken fifty years, and Voss’s multi-decade career in the FBI to reveal.

It was inspiring to realise that ABC-M has been validated as a negotiating technique (‘someone, somewhere already solved your problem’), but more importantly it triggered another blinding flash of the obvious in my head.

That flash started when I started to draw this 2×2 negotiation matrix:

Chris Voss made a jump into the ‘system 1’ emotional quadrant, but ultimately the solution strategies he ends up using once the other negotiating party has succumbed to Voss’s emotional ju-jitsu were still very much of the zero-sum, trade-off kind. Voss wins, you lose.

Which, I guess isn’t so bad if the person on the other side of the negotiation is a hostage-taking bank robber, but for something like Brexit, it can still only produce lose-lose or win-lose outcomes. No-one is going to come away from the negotiation having their cake and also eating it.

The only way to do that is to switch from an ‘optimization’ mindset to an innovation mindset. Negotiations are ultimately about contradictions, but truly resolving them – to deliver win-win – only happens when the contradiction is genuinely solved rather than assuming the answer inherently involves some kind of a trade-off. In this way, I’m pretty certain the next step-change in the shady, dysfunctional world of negotiation will be all about embracing the principles of TRIZ. And, if we acknowledge Voss’s findings, our TrenDNA research:

I think I can feel another book coming on…

I know it’s difficult, but the TRIZ community really needs to stop indulging in fatuous either/or arguments. Admittedly, sometimes its not always clear that’s what we’re doing. But if attendees at the 10th International Conference on Systematic Innovation last week spent half the conference falling in to the either/or trap, what chance do we have of making progress with the wider innovation community?

One paper at the conference was a call for accuracy in the various definitions of the TRIZ Ideality equation. Of which there are quite a lot. Here are a few of them:

1. Ideality = Sum Useful Effect / Sum Harmful Effects
2. Ideality = Sum(Useful Functions)/ Sum(Harmful Functions)
3. Ideality = Sum (Benefits)/ (Sum(Expenses)+ Sum (Harms))
4. Ideality = (Perceived){Benefits/(Cost+Harm)}
5. Ideality = Performance – (Harm + Interface + Cost)

If nothing else, there’s certainly plenty of scope for arguing which might be better or worse than another. The last one, for example, taken from patentinspiration.com, is particularly annoying because it fails to acknowledge the importance of measuring ratios when comparing good and bad things. My personal annoyance at this definition, however, is no reason at all to enter into an argument about it. Because it, like any other argument about the other definition differences would be value-less.

Here’s why. We know that ‘increasing ideality’ is one of the TRIZ pillars. That ideality moves in a clear direction tells us it is a vector. A direction of success.

If one person talks about benefits and another mixes benefits up with functions, provided they’re both consistent with the increasing ideality vector, it makes no difference at all that one might be a ‘better’ definition. You say tomayto, I say tomahto.

So when one TRIZ educator describes to their students that what they want to see (referring to a drone case study) is this:

Benefits (Functions) – lift, control, pilot feedback, payload capacity, flight duration, ground speed, acceleration
Cost – purchase, maintenance cost, electricity used, delivery time
Harm – weight, noise, battery disposal, collisions

(incidentally, several of which are neither functions nor benefits) When the student comes back with this –

Benefits (functions) – low weight, low noise, better manoeuvrability, faster delivery
Cost – lower cost than competitors
Harm – reduction in accidents

…that doesn’t make the student wrong. Or it shouldn’t. Everything the student has written down here is completely in line with the important part of the story. And that is that each answer is consistent with the increasing ideality vector. If our solution is lower cost than competitors, are we ‘more ideal’? Yes. If our solution is low weight, is that ‘more ideal’? Yes.

By forcing an unnecessary precision on students, all we end up doing as a community is perpetuating the ridiculousness of yet another either/or argument, and as a result getting further away from what’s important. Our job is to spot the either/or nonsense before we expose it to newcomers. And once we have spotted it, we need to realise our next job is to solve the contradiction and get to a higher level consensus. Arguing about whether ‘low weight’ is a function, a benefit, an outcome or an attribute is utterly futile, and, worse, confuses people about an important issue they very likely already instinctively understood. That ideality increases.

I think the final straw was being lectured by the editor of an academic journal on how to get a paper accepted in his august publication. It was like being back in a bad re-run of the 1970s. Academia is increasingly no longer fit for purpose. Certainly not when it comes to writing about innovation. Innovation happens elsewhere. And then – maybe – academia comes along and pontificates about what happened later. Academics are increasingly society’s historians.

This is a big pity because the world of innovation needs academia. But innovation means getting things out there, seeing what happened, learning from it, and trying again. No-one builds billion-dollar new products and services in one iteration. And it certainly doesn’t wait a year for referees to deliberate about the validity or otherwise about the latest iteration in the inherently complex innovation journey.

Worse still is TRIZ’s relationship to academia. Thanks to an accident of history, the original TRIZ research was not conducted by traditional academics. As TRIZ grew, it grew a completely separate mountain of knowledge. Which is a problem for TRIZ-sympathetic academics. The academic world works largely on citations. And so if an author isn’t able to cite something in the traditional academic world, it is highly likely their paper is going to be rejected by the traditional academic world. And there lies the rub. There’s barely anything in the traditional academic world’s mountain of knowledge that is of any significant value once a person knows TRIZ.

The TRIZ research has always been about distilling the world down to ‘first principles’. Which essentially means removing all of the failed innovation attempt noise and focusing instead on the signal coming from the 2% of attempts that ended successfully. Put more starkly, the tRIZ research tells us that 98% of traditional academic output is noise.

I often find myself showing the ‘two mountains’ graphic to try and explain the fundamental problem that the academic world has found itself embroiled in. Some – usually traditional academics – can’t comprehend how the two mountains are the same height. This is why I tend to label their mountain, ‘Mount Arrogant’, but, in fairness to them, I can see why they might be offended by the idea that a bunch or Soviet engineers might have accidentally uncovered what we now know to be fundamental truths about how the world works. In theory the academic world is all about ‘evidence-based’ knowledge acquisition. In practice, unfortunately, it is instead about Confirmation Bias and Wilful Blindness. Time and time again, TRIZ findings will tell a traditional researcher (or – worse – thir supervisor) that what they’re doing is dumb. Or has already been done by someone else. Or is looking in the wrong direction. No-one likes news like that. I get it.

That emotional trauma, however, can’t be allowed to alter the fact that the vast majority of the mountain of knowledge built by the traditional academic world isn’t knowledge at all. It is instead largely the science of trade-off and compromise, the science of being stuck inside a silo and failing to make connections to research in other domains, and the science of ill-founded hypotheses. If we include all of these scientific mis-steps, then sure, the traditional academic mountain might look enormous. But once we look more closely – through a TRIZ lens – the large majority of that mountain is mere landfill.

This is a problem for the traditional academic world. But it is ultimately also an enormous problem for the TRIZ world. A world that needs to build bridges between the two mountains. And do so even though the people on the other mountain are more often than not busy cutting the ropes.

As the political world is increasingly demonstrating, people have indeed ‘had enough of experts’. But the world is also beginning to wake up to the thought that while ‘blind ignorance’, Fake News and ‘my-opinion-beats-your-fact’ memes might be alternatives, they definitely don’t improve matters.

The world needs academia, just not the one we currently have. Academia needs to wake up. The revolution is here. Three-year PhD cycles, two-year editorial procrastination cycles no longer make any kind of sense. Neither does having academics working on trade-off and compromise projects. John Boyd’s OODA loop work tells us the former is wrong; TRIZ tells us the latter is wrong. The academics that learn the fastest are the ones that will prevail.  The world needs one mountain of knowledge not two. The academics that build the bridges are the ones that will prevail.

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
Mark Twain

As with most things in life, a piece of smart thinking quickly becomes corrupted when exposed to and adopted by the masses. The temptation to remove all the difficult bits of that original thinking in order to provide novices with the ‘easy button’ they yearn for inevitably always proves too great in the end.

I’m sure Annette Simmons – who’s pretty much devoted her career to the subject – John Bobo, Mathew Luhn and the myriad other authors who’ve tapped in to the same basic idea started out with the best of intentions. Their idea being that good storytelling is an important factor in achieving success in life. The person who tells the best story wins. Story makes the world go around. People do things for a good reason and a real reason. The real reason is the emotional one. And story is the shortcut way to our emotions.

I’m sure the original idea was that we were all supposed to add the story-telling importance meme to the existing idea that success came to those who told the truth. Truth plus story equals innovation.

But, of course, telling the truth is hard. And once people begin to realise that telling a good story, even if it is patently untrue, beats the dry truth seven times out of eight. And so starts a downward spiral that now sees most parts of the world stuck in a Fake News tailspin.

Arch-liar and Conservative politician, Andrea Leadsom, has taken to dismissing the words of experts as ‘just their opinion’, safe in the knowledge that the vast majority of her listeners will simply nod their heads in agreement. Much easier in our busy, over-scheduled lives to do that than think.

That the best story wins irrepsective of truth was made clear through the clickbait- soundbite victory that was the Brexit campaign. ‘Take back control’ makes for a great story. ‘Our Independence Day’ makes for an even greater one. No need to worry about the tiny question-mark of whether they’re true or not. We can all – Brexiteers included – patently see today that both are patent nonsense. But that becomes part of the story, part of Steve Bannon’s masterplan: no-one likes to admit they were wrong. And with that the RomCom devolves into inevitable tragedy.

We’re missing one final segment of the Complexity Landscape Model. The Fragile Zone is the space where a system is below the Ashby Line, above the Disintegration Line and the surrounding environment hasn’t reached Chaos. It is the Zone where the Ashby Margin (coming soon – see Systematic Innovation ezine, June issue) is negative. It is the Zone where the ability to change of the system is below the level of change likely to happen. It is the Zone where a majority of the enterprises on the planet typically find themselves. The further along the Operation Excellence road they have travelled, the further they are likely to descend into the Fragile Zone. They might have more money in the bank, but don’t know enough about how and when to invest it.

The fact that a majority of enterprises – commercial, public sector, government, NGO – find themselves in this Zone is because most leaders don’t understand complex systems. And that many of the management strategies relevant in a non-complex world no longer make sense when the world becomes complex.

The fact that they don’t all go out of business is all about the disruption pulse-rate of the domains they operate in. A mining company can afford to be fragile for 30+ years and still survive. A software company can afford to be fragile for about 30 days. Careful with that ‘connecting-the-world’ axe, Facebook.

A murmuration of starlings is one of the complex system examples I use a lot in workshops. No starling is in charge and the shape of the formation emerges based on local shifts in the environment: a gust of wind or thermal causes one bird to deviate from its course, which then leads all the birds around it to have to deviate from theirs.

When a bird of prey arrives on the scene, however, as shown in the photo above, complexity quickly devolves into chaos. Now each starling instead of ‘staying as close to their neighbours as possible’ switches to a new rule: ‘get away from the falcon’. And chaos ensues.

For a while at least. Once the falcon has acquired dinner, the rest of the starlings know they’re safe. And so the Chaos can settle down again, back to the original complex system and its emergent patterns.

I thought I’d see what the story looks like when plotted onto the Complexity Landscape Model. I did it from two perspectives – firstly looking at the murmuration as a whole, and second zooming in and looking at one starling. Here’s what I think the two perspective look like prior to the arrival of the falcon: The murmuration as a whole is a complex system operating in a complex (weather-driven) environment, whereas, because each starling is flying to the same basic, simple ‘stay as close to your neighbour…’ instruction, I think we could describe this as simple-simple. Because the formation and each bird is operating stably, I’ve placed both above the Ashby Line:

Now let’s have a look at what happens when the falcon arrives. Let’s look at the whole formation first. The first impact of the falcon’s arrival is that the environment shifts to the right, across the Ashby Line. When the falcon first arrives, the formation doesn’t ‘know’ that the world as changed, but once the first starlings realise there is a new threat, then the formation swiftly devolves into chaos. Not only that, but each starling also quickly realises there’s a problem and the whole system tumbles into the Chaos-Chaos segment of the CLM. This breakdown happens very quickly. So the fall from a complex system to a chaotic one, looking at it on the Landscape, is rather like falling down a lift-shaft.

When the falcon has caught least weakest, most-adjacent starling, the chaotic environment stabilises, and then when the rest of the starlings realise this, the murmuration returns to its previous state.

At the level of the individual starling, the ‘environment’ becomes its immediate neighbours rather than the whole murmuration. At this level, the falcon emergency looks more like this:

The ‘lift-shaft’ fall is shorter this time because we’re starting from Simple rather than Complex, but nevertheless, its still a rapid tumble into chaos once the starling realises there’s a problem. I’ve drawn the trajectory such that the individual starling again returns to the same basic start point. If the starling in question is one of the ones that had a lucky escape, however, it may well be that they learn something from the experience and as a result make a subtle shift upwards (‘more resilient) and possibly diagonally to the right. I’m not sure though… I get to see murmurations a lot, and have done for a good number of years and I’ve not seen any evidence at all of starlings evolving to develop better falcon avoidance strategies. By the same token, I’ve witnessed several organisations falling down their own chaos lift-shafts and I haven’t seen much learning from them either. Time will tell.

I’ve long been a fan (and user) of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. We’re in the discontinuous change business. Which means s-curves. And specifically the jump between s-curves. The Hero’s Journey provides a compelling, stage-by-stage description of what these s-curve jumps look like. I’ve yet to meet an innovator yet that isn’t able to empathise with the model and recognise all of the stages their innovation project passed through.

My new favourite thing is our Complexity Landscape Model (CLM). It was only a matter of time before we sought to try a mash-up with the Hero’s Journey. The results felt important. Here’s where we’re at so far:

Ordinary World – the start of the Hero’s Journey sees the Hero in their ‘normal’, usually calm and ordered world. From a CLM perspective, this equates to where many of us aspire to live our lives – in a stable state in the Simple-Simple zone.

Call To Adventure – something goes wrong. The Hero doesn’t always realise it at the time, but what’s happened is something in their environment changes and that change drops the Hero below the Ashby Line. Resilience and stability are no more.

Crossing The Threshold – after initially refusing the Call (a thwarted attempt to get back above the Ashby Line), and receiving the wise words of the Mentor, the Hero crosses the Threshold into Campbell’s ‘Special World’. For the Hero, this means that they have entered Chaos. They know they have to jump off the metaphorical cliff, but they also have little if any idea what’s coming next, or what they’re going to do about it.

Tests, Allies & Enemies – here are usually the most exciting parts of the Journey, certainly if it is a Hollywood movie manifestation of the Journey. Not only is the Hero’s ‘system’ in chaos, but so now is their surrounding environment.

The Ordeal – Chaos is a very unstable state and because of this it tends not to prevail for very long. Sooner or later, the Hero’s David-versus-Goliath contradiction emerges from the mess. The environmental chaos subsides and some kind of complex order appears.

The Reward – if the contradiction is to be solved, the Hero’s ‘system’ needs to become increasingly smarter. Solving contradictions demands at least a Complicated-capable means of taking on the world, and quite possibly a Complex one.

The Road Back – the Hero’s way of dealing with the situation increasingly comes to match the level of complexity of their surroundings. When the Hero enters the Complex-Complex zone, its possible to leave the Special World and enter ‘Ordinary World’ of the new s-curve.

Return With Elixir – somewhere on the road back, a death and resurrection is required. This may be the Hero, or, more usually it is redundant knowledge. Only after this has happened can the Hero cross the Ashby Line and claim the Elixir.

Crucially, at the end of the story, the Hero (and by proxy, the audience) is supposed to have learned something. This learning is symbolised by the fact that the end position on the Complexity Landscape is usually higher up than the position at the start of the Journey. This is the case even in Hero’s Journeys that fall into the Tragedy category. Tragedies, Rags-To-Riches, Icarus, Man-In-A-Hole or Oedipus stories in fact all follow the same basic trajectory. I expect I’ll be intrigued enough to go and explore the subtle differences between each of these various different story types in future posts. Probably in the context of studying specific books or films. Spending my afternoons watching movies… sounds like my favourite kind of research…

Ever wondered why the world is full of cracked paving stones?

I finally worked it out. A couple of years ago, I had someone come and lay a paved path outside my house. I watched the process as it progressed. I also asked the people doing the job why it was that there were so many cracked paving stones in the world. ‘Bad construction’ was the gist of their reply. Which I took at the time to mean, ‘cowboy builders, at the opposite end of the construction industry spectrum to us’.

But – of course – here we are two years later and several of my non-cowboy fitted paving stones are cracked.

Having watched the installation process, and now seen that it’s pretty much the same process you’ll read about on any of the thousand plus online tutorials, the likelihood or otherwise that a person will end up with cracked paving slabs outside their house has virtually no correlation with the skill or lack of skill of the builder, but rather the fact that the whole premise of how paving slabs are laid is dumb.

That premise starts with an assumption that the earth under the slab,  the mortar that sits below the slab, and the sub-base that sits below the mortar doesn’t move. This is pretty much the same assumption used when roads get built and the track for railways gets laid. The only difference being the thickness and type of the sub-base layers.

This feels to me a bit like builder version of King Canute. That, by drawing a line in the metaphorical and actual sand, they might order the tide not to come in. In the fight between regal dictat and Mother Earth, however, Mother Earth wins approximately 100 times out of 100.

One of the principle characteristics of the Earth is that it moves. (A geologist friend once tried to amaze me with the ‘interesting’ (his word) factoid that the Earth’s crust has the same basic strength, stiffness and viscosity properties as toothpaste).

This being the case, one would have expected that someone by now might have worked out how to design structures that remained stable despite the fact that the ground they were built upon was moving. Sure enough, lots of people have solved this problem. They just never told the paving slab industry. Or the people that sell beautifully sieved ballast to hold railway sleepers in place. If such discussions had taken place, the railway ballast experts would have realised that what they’ve created is just about the worst possible ballast stone size profile. And paving slabs and the bases that sit under them wouldn’t keep looking like they have done for the last n-thousand years.

None of this is rocket science. Rather it’s a little bit of zero-cost geometric cunning. Something I’m in the process of integrating into my replacement paved path. Something I’m also pretty certain the path-laying, road-constructing, railtrack-laying industries have no interest in at all. After all, if paving stones didn’t crack every couple of years, if potholes didn’t appear in our roads every winter and if rail crews didn’t have to make daily checks on the integrity of the track, they’d run out of work for everyone within a year. And who’d want that?

Is Cher’s 1989 album, Heart Of Stone, the greatest album ever? That’s the question.
I’m joking. It has a couple of okay singles on it, but I’ve yet to see the album in anyone’s Top Fifty.

Cher, in any event is much busier with other things these days. Like this pair of Tweets, which appeared within a few minutes of each other the other day. My good friend Costas found them and challenged me to resolve the global conundrum they seemed to convey:

I looked at Cher’s outpurrings. Then I looked again. And then again some more. I could see she had a point. Or was it two? My contradiction-radar is usually quite finely tuned, but I was struggling. Was it an immigration-and-no-immigration contradiction? Or a climate-change-and-no-climate change problem? Or both? Or neither?

Just like Jesse James, I needed some incubation time.

Was there a way to combine the two contradictions into one vicious cycle? Was it possible to get two pairs of conflicting perceptions into one coherent loop, where each ‘leads to’ link between one perception and the next made logical sense?

It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle when it isn’t clear the pieces are all from the same picture. Plus, half the pieces are missing.

When trying to make sense of a complex problem, there’s no rule to say there has to be one vicious cycle, but if you can find one, you’re well on the way to an opportunity to gain some real insight into what the ‘real’ problem might be. Time to start starting over. Bring on the title track. And some emotional fire…

After all that, there it was. Problem clear. Solution clearer. If I could turn back time…

For the last thirteen months I’e been forced to add an hour’s worth of contingency to my journeys to Heathrow thanks to the UK Government’s programme to turn a 32 mile stretch of dumb M4 motorway into a shiny new smart motorway.

The UK has a traffic problem. I get that. More cars, same infrastructure, no money equals more queues. Except that the M4 smart motorway scheme is scheduled to cost £848M by the time they finish next year. So there is money. And, by the looks of the equally disruptive smart motorway projects elsewhere in the country, several billion pounds worth. The only problem then is just how pathetic the whole thing is.

Because, rest assured, anyone with the slightest bit of common sense, when you see what the smart motorway actually consists of, will realise it is a really, really dumb solution. The stupidity goes something like this. When motorways like the M4 were built, cars weren’t as reliable as they are today, so in addition to the three lanes of motorway, there was another ‘hard-shoulder’ lane built next to the inside lane. The idea being that, if you broke down, you pulled off the road, onto the hard shoulder, got out of your car and waited for rescue to arrive. Now cars have become more reliable, someone has made the decision to turn the hard shoulders into a fourth lane. Bingo. Another 33% capacity added to the motorway network. Or, that’s the way it looks until you start actually thinking about it.

Not that anybody apparently did. A bit like the German newspaper Brexit-related headline from the other week, the UK version of a smart motorway is ‘Der große Clusterfuck’. Three things in particular should have rung alarm bells:
1) Hard-shoulders weren’t universally provided (e.g. adjacent to bridges), so turning hard-shoulders into fourth lanes can often mean, where there was no hard-shoulder in the first place, the four-lane motorway periodically shrinks to become a three-lane motorway. So a three-lane motorway with no bottlenecks now becomes a four-lane motorway with multiple bottlenecks. Which in effect means that the traffic is effectively still constrained to flow the same amount of traffic as the original three-lane road. Except now with added stop-start blockages.
2) In order to allow broken-down cars to find refuge, every two miles or so, a short ‘emergency refuge area’ has been built. This is in effect a new fifth lane. Except it is about six car lengths long. I’ve never tried to decelerate my car from 70mph to zero over emergency-stop like distances to get into one of these areas so far, but I imagine the skill required to do so is akin to that used by stunt drivers performing the trick of driving towards a parallel parking space between two cars at 90degrees, slamming on the handbrake and spinning into the parking space. Surprise, surprise, those poor unfortunate souls that have had to make use of the emergency refuge areas have frequently found themselves not just broken down, but also crashed into. That is, provided there wasn’t someone already parked up in the Refuge area for a comfort break. Or because they felt sleepy. Or had an incoming call to take. All of which, according to a recent survey, is what 83% of users are using them for. Net result: the Government has now had to embark on a national TV advertising campaign to tell people what they can and can’t use the Emergency Refuge Areas for. And so another £10M gets flushed away.

3) Finally, and worst of all, is the ‘smart’ part of the smart motorway system. In order to compensate for the potential problem of broken down cars struggling to get into the Emergency Refuge Areas, there is a system of sensors built into the roads and a host of overhead signs to actively vary the speed limit. This is the part of the debacle that’s responsible for a big part of the £848M. Digging up the roads to lay miles and miles of sensor cable is utterly dumb.

It’s dumb because all the information required to tell vehicles to slow down if there’s a problem ahead is already available. For free. In the ether. On everyone’s mobile phone or satnav signal. As the TRIZ trend tells us, mechanical solutions always evolve to ‘field’ based solutions. You don’t need cables when the field-based signal is already there. You don’t need to dig the roads up. And you don’t need to keep digging the roads up when the cables start failing. As cables and their connectors are apt to do. There’s nothing magic about this evolution trend. Except, of course, as far as the construction companies are concerned, they wouldn’t get to charge £848M any more. And they lose all of the maintenance charges they’ll no doubt accrue over the course of the next twenty years. Another few billion dollars down the drain. And twenty years during which British drivers will be stuck with a ‘smart’ system that was outdated before it was even commissioned.

Yes, but, I hear the construction companies say, mechanical sensors are more accurate than the wifi signals. What happens when the wifi is down? They have a point. The ‘field’ based solution isn’t as accurate today as the mechanical sensor system will be. But by next year it will be. And it will give a whole bunch of side benefits that the mechanical system will never be able to reproduce. How do we know this?

Answer because, when we go look at Alibaba’s ‘City Brain 2.0’ smart motorway solution for big cities in China that’s precisely what it does. But not just 32 miles of one motorway. No. Because it is cloud-based, it automatically covers every road. None of which need to be dug up. If I was a betting man, I’d be willing to bet that the UK Government could have made a City Brain 2.0 solution covering the whole of the Union for a fifth of the price of the stupid 32 mile stretch of wire and duct tape bollocks on the M4. Think about that, politicians and construction company managers as you spend an hour sitting in stationary traffic, late for your next Heathrow flight to Idiotsville.