Natural Paths
Balancing Flow
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines and, in doing so, come up with unique insights and solutions. Fundamentally, a Polymath is a type of thinker who spans diverse specialties and weaves together insights that the domain experts often don’t see.
Today’s topic looks at the benefits and risks of natural paths, that is, those flows in life that we sometimes follow without knowing, or block without understanding. Both behaviors lead to risk, and only by understanding and investigating can we find the proper balance.
A common experience we all encounter is when well-intentioned designers lay pathways that don’t follow natural paths. This was largely the case at my alma mater, Michigan Tech, and they spent a lot of effort trying to block students from taking shortcuts because the forced walkways just didn’t flow. Examples abound where design ‘art’ gets in the way of function, and people take action. In a way, this represents hubris on the designer’s part when they force an unnatural flow.
The Ohio State University took a different approach and let students follow what are called ‘desire paths.’ The designers watched where students naturally walked from one class to another. After a few months, paths were worn that became the template for their future landscaping. The result was organic, if slightly chaotic, and allowed flow.
There’s an entire subreddit, r/DesirePath, that documents this behavior. Their self-description reads: “Dedicated to the paths that humans prefer, rather than the paths that humans create.” These are natural paths and provide a great opportunity to analyze flow, improve layouts, and meet people’s needs.
However, we quickly start to face a mounting contradiction. On the one hand, the desire path makes sense for an integrated, organic design. It’s a great idea to include in everything from technology to civil engineering and website design. On the other hand, there’s a risk in that these same natural paths can also enable bad behavior.
In the Army, there’s a foundational tactic called ‘avoiding natural lines of drift.’ This means avoiding these same desire paths as you maneuver through the terrain because these natural paths are also where you plan ambushes or use them to direct the enemy where you want them for your tactical advantage. They’re called ‘lines of drift’ because we unintentionally flow toward them as the path of least resistance. We drift along them when we aren’t cognizant that it’s even happening.
A great example of this was a training exercise at the National Training Center (NTC) in California, where I received a mission order to conduct a high-value target grab-and-go training lane that was described as a ‘mass casualty event.’ Since I wasn’t keen to die in a war game or otherwise, and nothing in the mission order directed me to deliberately attack the enemy, I laid out our maps and plotted all the ways the mission could become a mass casualty event.
This intentional inversion identified that the desire path, the natural line of drift, would funnel my platoon into a shooting lane where we’d be boxed in, and with no maneuverability. So, we plotted a route that didn’t follow the desire paths, and we executed the mission with not only zero casualties, but we didn’t even have to fire our weapons. We just avoided the natural path and took the hard path instead, bypassing the ambush point.
The irony here was that my commander was livid with me for ‘failing’ the objective of mass casualties. My adherence to fundamental tactics was poorly viewed because so many others took that desire path that it cemented it as the only path. My mission grader stepped in to explain that the NTC doesn’t have mass casualty lanes. It just so happens that sometimes a lane becomes so because of drift, and then misnaming the event.1 I was the only officer to pass that lane during the entire training event, yet I was treated as a pariah rather than a success.
It’s a similar situation to how we kept driving soldiers into IEDs in Iraq because we ignored that it was a classic ambush along the natural lines of drift and at chokepoints. Instead of treating it as a tactics problem, we treated it like a technology problem, a situation we explored in The Enemy’s Gate is Down.
It’s interesting that, on the one hand, we force natural flow into unnatural channels. On the other hand, we uncritically drift toward easy, natural paths that lead to common pitfalls and ambushes in life. In a way, both behaviors are similar in that they demonstrate a lack of reflection, consideration, or analysis on what we are doing. The forced fitting is hubristic and unnatural, and the unassessed drift reflects passivity that lacks agency to go against the flow.
This is where the balance is essential. We need to cast a critical eye on many of the natural flows we have and force a realignment away to avoid. It’s akin to Matthew 7:13-14, where Jesus says, “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and few find it.” Let’s just say, getting away from the easy, natural paths isn’t easy. It takes constant diligence and attention.
That doesn’t mean we just throw out all of the easy paths, either. This is the other side of the balance because there were times when I set my platoons on the easy path, well aware of the risks, because it allowed us to achieve a different objective. The same thing goes for not always re-creating the wheel, following best practices, and looking for commonalities across domains and disciplines. Sometimes the easy path is the right path to follow.
This is where natural paths AND avoiding natural lines of drift can be balanced. The first takes advantage of the flow. The second keeps our eyes open to the common failures. Finding that balance requires the core of what we do here with insatiable curiosity, the humility to accept we don’t know all the answers, and intentional reframing to see if we can shift the nature of the problem. That’s the power of the Polymathic Mindset.
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