The Ordering Problem: Reasonable decisions that lead to dumb outcomes

The Ordering Problem is when a series of individually reasonable decisions constrain later choices and result in dumb outcomes.

Here are a few examples I’ve noticed time and again.

Some examples of the ordering problem

The selfish parker

Somebody arrives early at a long, empty parking bay. They park their car in the middle, or perhaps near where they need to go.

People continue to arrive throughout the day, filling up the other spaces. Later, the car park is busy. People are desperately squeezing their cars in wherever they can. Now, it appears that the first car is blocking several spaces. Drivers pass by, cursing the owner of the car who parked so badly.

The ridiculous queue

Queues are sensitive to how they form. When a queue is small, it doesn’t matter very much where you stand behind the person in front. You’re at the back after all. But if the queue grows quickly, it will usually follow the initial direction set by where the early joiners chose to stand.

Later visitors arrive to see a large queue tracing a dumb route, perhaps across a major walkway or up a flight of steps, rather than queuing out of the way where there’s plenty of space. How could people be so dumb?! Often, it was just because someone early on stood slightly to the left or right of the person in front of them. The decision had little impact on them, and is perfectly reasonable if a queue stays small.

The cinema with lots of single seats

Arriving early to an empty cinema, you may have the pick of the seats. It doesn’t seem to matter where you choose. Later groups take their seats influenced by the few seats that are taken. Perhaps new arrivals, out of courtesy, make sure to leave a space between them and the people already seated. Sometimes groups mean spaces are left next to the aisles.

Arriving late to what’s now a nearly full cinema, you see many awkwardly-sized gaps that don’t work for your group when there are plenty of seats available. Why would people do this?!

Naming conventions

At the start of a software project, someone chooses a quick naming convention for a few files they are working with. The feature is popular and as code around it grows, people add files following the same approach. Later developers, now working on a more complex system, find themselves battling a confusing structure that’s very difficult to redo.

What to do about the Ordering Problem?

I think we can’t always avoid the ordering problem, but there are a few things we can do to help.

If you arrive before others, you can consider what may happen later—will it get busy?—and make a choice that’s considerate of later arrivals.
Many situations that appear dumb or insensitive were created by perfectly reasonable decisions at the point they were made. So, for our own benefit as much as others, we could probably do with cutting people a little more slack.

It's quite hard to, for example, reconfigure the direction of a queue if you're just one person joining a queue with no authority over others. So organisations can and should, I think, take responsibility for putting structures in place and giving guidance to steer us all towards better collective outcomes. It can be as simple as marking out spaces, or being the one to say ‘queue this way’. It benefits everyone.

For instance, an employee outside a ticket office where a line often develops that can block a path can, and should, move and direct people to a more sensible queuing direction. And where possible, they should anticipate this and use signage and barriers to nudge the queue to be better for everyone.

Path Dependency

The ordering problem is related to path dependency in the social sciences and economics. Both describe how early decisions shape what happens later. A common example of path dependency is how the QWERTY keyboard layout, though non-optimal, is now too difficult and expensive to change. Other examples are driving on the left/right, or using imperial vs metric.

The ordering problem is the challenge of many individually reasonable decisions made sequentially, without coordination, producing an arrangement that later works poorly. It routinely creates frustrating, non-optimal outcomes in everyday life, especially in social situations.

Everyday life is full of occasions that appear badly designed but were simply the result of reasonable decision after reasonable decision. Remembering this helps me chill out a bit. It also gets me thinking about how early small design decisions and direction by a few can have a big positive influence for many later on.

Have you seen the ordering problem in action?