Trailfinding

Trail comes and goes depending on how much you need it. Where many ways will go, people disperse and take them all, and so the trail fades and disappears. You don’t need it. When the way gets hard the trail becomes clear again—there are only a few ways to go, and people find those over and over. This happens everywhere, wherever people walk the land. Most trails were never planned, you see, but were made by a collective of people spread through time, all evaluating the slope on their own, and very often coming to the same conclusions.

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Martians

You can see this effect when you look at literal trails, climbing routes, backcountry paths: where there’s wide flats, there may as well be no trail at all, and little sign of any footfalls; where there’s steeps and narrows and hazards, so many folks have gone ahead in the few ways that work that a trail forms, even absent intention.

This isn’t limited to taking walks in the woods.

You can see where time and effort has been spent historically in large codebases with the right tooling, giving you a high-level view of what areas are well-trod and what are more freewheeling.

Leading the way through a tricky situation–a product recall, or a difficult conversation with a direct report–it’s well worth your time to check for the markers of an existing trail. There’s not a lot of successful ways through, and so these trails get encoded as a limited set of best practices.

Or if you’re planning something that’s got a visibly much wider range of possible implementations–say, a work retreat, or putting together a hiring strategy–you can take some pressure off yourself by acknowledging that the path isn’t necessarily clear precisely because there’s so many different ways in which others have already succeeded.

With today ahead of you, are you in a gentle clearing, or should you be looking for the footfalls on the paths of others?