You’re at work and you’re trying to locate someone. They’re not at their desk and you’ve asked the cubicle next to them to no avail.
What do you do?
I bet if you did some traffic analysis (fancy term for snooping on people by pointing cameras around the office and hitting record) you could probably identify each person’s 1st or 2nd most common routes through the office. That might be the path to and from the bathroom or maybe to the designated smoking area. It could also be the path to the elevator as they sneak off to Starbucks every ten minutes to get their fix.
Regardless of the why, you might be able to say with some degree of certainty, that if they are not at their desk, the next best place to find them is somewhere along that pathway.
Now, if you actually went so far as to paint everyone’s pathways on the floor of the office, in addition to it looking funny, would it lead to a change in people’s behaviors? Would people change that route because they don’t want to feel predictable? Would they take a different route if they didn’t want to be found?
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