You have to drop off 2 things after school, get to the shops and back home — which route should you take? You drive an Amazon delivery van and you have 145 parcels to deliver across London — what’s the most efficient route?

It’s pretty clear that for situations like the first one, with fewer stops, assuming you know travel distances or travel times, you could figure out the best route by trying out the different combinations until you hit on the shortest. The trouble is as you keep adding extra stops it doesn’t get just a little bit harder — instead the difficulty continues to increase along with the time it will take to find an answer.

Figuring out the shortest route to visit all the stops and return back home is known as the travelling salesman problem. It’s a problem formulated over 150 years ago that still has relevance and interest today whether it’s for delivering parcels, stocking shelves or soldering transistors.

The travelling salesman problem

In 2016 the British Government had plans to launch a new polar research vessel. To decide on a name for it, they put it out to a public vote. Despite a number of serious, meaningful or historic names suggested, like Shackleton and Endeavour, one name put forward, Boaty McBoatface, quickly overwhelmed all the other options put together.

It turns out this is not limited to the British sense of humour, and people will vote for a joke candidate because it’s fun and subversive, and people want to see what will happen if it wins. This NYT article by Katie Rogers has some other fun examples of competitions going ‘wrong’, such as an attempt to name a bridge 'Chuck Norris’ and selecting a school for the deaf as a concert location: What you get when you let the Internet decide.

I learned about the Boaty McBoatface effect from Dr Roger Miles on the Human Risk podcast. Also see Conduct Risk Management: A behavioural approach by Dr Roger Miles.

The Boaty McBoatface effect

The more transparent your workplace the less transparent your employees. In an age of trackers, wearables, online monitoring, workplace chat and always-on devices it turns out that not only does a more transparent workplace actually drive people to more secretive behaviours, but that adding a little more privacy actually may improve productivity also.

Very simply, the transparency paradox is the idea that increasingly transparent, open, observable workplaces can create less transparent employees.

See Harvard prof Ethan Bernstein’s The Transparency Paradox study (pdf) or I learned about it from the Freakonomics podcast: Yes, the Open Office Is Terrible — But It Doesn’t Have to Be.

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The transparency paradox