Every park has them. The path the designers drew: paved, deliberate, the route someone decided you should take. And then, a few metres away, a line worn across the grass, where people actually walk.
Planners call this second one a ‘desire line’.
Most organisations have both. The paved paths are the formal communication: agreed norms, meeting timetables, agendas, documented delegations, decision protocols. The worn tracks are the informal: the corridor conversation, the text before the meeting, the questions we do and don’t ask.
Here’s the trap. We design paths from the architect’s studio – norms drafted at an offsite by an optimistic leadership team, imagining how they’d like to walk. Then everyone goes back out into the park… Before long there’s one paved path nobody uses… And a ‘keep off the grass’ sign staked to try and influence where people are actually walking!
The move isn’t to draw better paths from the studio. It’s to watch where the team already walks.
But not every worn track is a desire line.
Some shortcuts are people finding a better route: the informal channel that’s faster than the formal one. Those might be worth paving.
Others are something else. The pre-meeting before the meeting. The kitchen conversation with three of the six executives. People aren’t taking those routes because they’re more efficient. They’re taking them to avoid the main path!
Those aren’t desire lines. They’re avoidance lines. So the question to address isn’t ‘should we formalise this?’ but ‘why is the main path being avoided?’
Beau read the wrong answer. He was frustrated his executives weren’t taking initiative, leaving him stretched thin, picking up lobbying, union negotiations and a crisis response that two of his executives should have owned. His communication preference was ‘put it in writing’: emails, papers, business cases. Even decisions well within an executive’s delegation needed Beau’s written endorsement.
Beau had paved the wrong path. He’d formalised everything, strangled the informal channels his team needed, and then read the passivity as a people problem. It wasn’t. It was a path problem — and he’d built it.
If you’re new in the CEO chair, watch where your team actually walks. Distinguish the desire lines from the avoidance lines. One is efficiency: pave it, or leave it be. The other is a symptom: and the fix is never a ‘keep off the grass’ sign. It’s asking what’s wrong with the path they won’t take.
Which of your team’s shortcuts are desire lines? And which are avoidance lines?
Go Fearlessly – Corrinne
PS The avoidance line you’re most tempted to explain away is usually the one worth exploring. Where’s the main path in your team that no one wants to take?
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