Looking Out for Desire Lines

An analogy to start the week, dear readers. I don’t know about you, but I love them.

Just imagine for a moment you’re a person who designs and plans recreation spaces — parks, play areas, picnic spots, ponds with ducks and the like.

A couple of months after the opening your perfect park you go to see how it’s being utilised only to find a bald patch of grass where the great unwashed have strayed off your beautiful stone path to make a shortcut across the turf.

You’d feel pretty fed up I bet. But what would you do?

You might erect “Keep to the Path!” signs; fit some ugly barriers along the path or go completly bonkers and employ burly security guards.

Then again maybe you’d just get miserable and put it down to the gradual decline of modern society.

In the real world this sort of thing happens all the time. So much so that environmental planners and designers have a phrase to describe the phenomenon, “desire lines”.

A dictionary definition may read something like:

desire line  An informal, preferred path used to get from one location to another rather than using the official route.

So what do planners do in such situations?

Invariably they move the path to the one that’s being unofficially used. That way the punters are happy, the park stays looking nice and the planners sleep at nights.

Now you’re probably wondering, what does all this have to do with running a business.

Quite simply this: If you have procedures or policies that people are not following — “pay within 7 days”, “read and sign this three month contract”, as examples — just consider the “desire line” carefully before you go beating up your clients.

It may just be they are trying to tell you something. Something you’d do well to hear.

Quick, beat a path to the comments section and share your thoughts.