I came across a story that could potentially be a Hollywood blockbuster. This is the story of a mayor who transformed an entire city, an unruly one into one that learnt to follow rules. He did this by breaking all the rules about how a politician should look like or behave like. And the entire transformation of the city started by getting “Mime” artists performing on the street.
Problem:
To understand the extent of the ingenuity, lets first try to comprehend the problem that was being tackled (sounds a lot like our cities):
- Lots of people dying on the roads due to accidents.
- Traffic jams galore around the city as neither pedestrians nor motorists would not follow the traffic rules.
- Corrupt cops who would prefer accepting bribes & letting traffic violators go against fining them and bringing them in to face the law.
Trying to tackle even just one of these problems would be difficult enough, try addressing all three together.
Lets just take a minute and think about what would you do if you were elected mayor of a city like this one…
Solution:
Instead of increasing the policing or launching a mass media advertising campaign to ask people to behave, the mayor took a group of “mime” artists to the street and asked them to show people what their rights were on the road (both motorists and pedestrians). And make it a spectacle of doing it. Though, most people dismissed the idea as a gimmick and expected it to not work…
Results:
Boy did it work… Deaths on the roads reduced by more than 50%… traffic jams reduced as people started following the rules… This allowed the mayor to weed out the corrupt cops, some of whom then went on to sign up to become the “mimes” on the road educating and humoring people on road etiquette.
The transformation of the city had just begun. This mayor went on to do great work changing how people acted in the cities.
He brought in “The Carrot Rule”, which was that the city will not be allowed to party post 1:00AM and many more.
He was followed by another mayor equally innovative, who changed the way the entire city looked. He built 100’s of public parks, migrated slum dwellers in to low-cost housing, built some of the best schools and libraries in the poorest neighbourhood.
Within 3 terms between them, together they transformed the entire city.
The city we are talking about is Bogotá. The mayors we are Antanus Mockus and Enrique Penalosa.
You can watch an entire documentary film on how these two mayors transformed Bogotá here (Strongly recommend that you go watch this documentary).
Learning:
There are a few things that I learn from this transformation story:
- To solve a large complex problems, you don’t need a large and complex solution. Rather you need simple solutions to solve complex problems.
- Trying to solve complex problems in isolation doesn’t really work. We need to look at a holistic solution and a solution that works like a ripple travelling through multiple complex problems and solving them all with the same single idea
- Large scale behaviour problems can best be tackled with emotional solutions. Solutions that address our primal emotions like love, hate or shame. This is the exact idea that Mahatma Gandhi used against the British in the Indian fight for independence.
- One other reason not to throw out crazy ideas out the door without giving them serious consideration.
- The importance of connecting disparate fields to come up with a novel solution for a problem is the best way to solve any given problem.
In conclusion:
From a social context, I think our cities are again in need of such mayors and politicians who are able to think creatively and who can bring together a team that can go about transforming our cities.
From a business context, I think we need to develop the skill to look at a given problem and not be wary of trying out seemingly crazy ideas to solve them.
