What Mumbai Traffic Taught Me About Lean-Agile

I recently returned from a short trip to Mumbai, India. It was my first time visiting that city full of brilliant culture, delicious food, and friendly people. I can't wait for my next visit!

Traffic, though, is not the city's best feature. The very best thing I can say about it is...it works for them. I know there must be rules that govern the system, but coming from a Western culture, I can't quite find them. There are no lanes, per se, only buses, trucks, cars, tuk tuks, and motorcycles jockeying for position and honking at one another, announcing either "I'm here, look out for me," or "Move! Now!"

At the end of my stay, as I was preparing to leave the office and head to the airport, I could have either taken an airport shuttle bus from my hotel, an Uber, or a tuk tuk. For those who have never spent time in Southeast Asia, a tuk tuk is a tiny, three-wheeled open-air taxi powered by what might be a souped up lawnmower engine. Being somewhat adventurous, I decided to go for the tuk tuk and for 100 rupees (less than $1.50) I secured a ride to the airport.

In transit to the airport, I started noticing something I had missed, but had been right in front of my eyes the whole time. Tuk tuks are the right way to get around in Mumbai. They can dart between cars, squeeze into open spaces, outmaneuver buses, and even go on sidewalks (I saw this happen). A trip that might otherwise take 20 minutes suddenly only takes 10 minutes. I took some video of my tuk tuk ride, which you can see here. (Notice where all the tuk tuk and motorcycles end up - right at the front of the queue!)

Being a Lean-Agile nerd, the lesson about the importance of batch sizes hit me immediately. Small batches flow through a system far more easily than large batches. That is especially true as a system approaches full utilization. If we define business value as an individual person reaching the airport, value delivery happens much faster in a tuk tuk compared to a shuttle bus. It's tempting to think, "Hey, let's batch up a bunch of people and put them in a bus, and we'll efficiently deliver them to the airport." But in that model, local resource optimization is favored over cycle time, or system-level optimization, and that's usually not a good trade.

In your business, are you favoring local optimization over cycle time? Are you waiting until the bus is full and then driving it to the airport, or are you putting features in a tuk tuk and delivering them to the airport as fast as possible?