According to Bristol University, the average road user spends six months of his or her life in traffic jams.

We all know the feeling. There we are sitting in a traffic jam waiting for the congestion to clear and when it finally does, there is no apparent cause for the delay.

This new study shows that a single driver braking very slightly will prompt drivers behind to err on the side of caution. The knock-on effect grows and grows until a few miles back, baffled drivers find themselves at a halt.

I drive around the UK a lot and I often find myself mystified by the driving of motorists in the overtaking lane. When the roads are busy, significant numbers of drivers cram themselves into the outside lane, drive very close to the car in front and spend most of their journey tapping on the brakes. I don’t know if I missed something in my driving lessons, but isn’t it common sense to adjust our speed by switching from lane to lane to keep the whole traffic system moving?

So what is the cause? From my observation of any of the major motorways in Britain it is drivers choosing to travel at around 60 miles per hour positioning themselves in the middle lane when they could very comfortably travel in the inside lane, leaving the middle and the overtaking lane for drivers wanting to travel at speeds in excess of this switching as their required speed dicatates.

According to Dr Eddie Wilson from University of Bristol http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2010/6948.html these stop-and-go waves caused by illogical driving behaviour are generated by very small events at the level of individual vehicles. In certain situations a tipping point is reached that magnifies small effects to create large changes that can involve hundreds of vehicles and which may be a couple of miles long.

I have seen this phantom behaviour in organisations and it is incredibly influential in our perception of ‘the way things work around here’ and organisational culture.

Let me give an example. Earlier this year, I was working with a team of around 30 people to find out what got in the way of good performance. Four people said that they were unhappy that others frowned on them if they left work early and they felt it was ‘not the way things worked around here’ to leave early – for any reason. After the fourth comment, a colleague bravely asked the group  if they believed it was true that, as a collective, it was generally felt to damage performance if one of more of the team left the office ‘early’.

A silence fell and before a response was forthcoming, people carefully considered each other. The response came back ‘of course we don’t’. The four people who had raised the concern paused – they realised they had inferred the culture existed when it didn’t. What was more, their interpretation was affecting wider group behaviour – they stayed when they needed to go because they felt it was unacceptable to do otherwise.

For this team, this was a critical turning point in realising that individual team members determined the working climate.

But what does this tell us about human behaviour? On the roads, we can hardly blame people driving in the outside lane for causing what Bristol University calls ‘phantom traffic jams’. As the entire road system ‘moves to the right’, the left lanes become virtually unoccupied causing inevitable jams. The actions of each individual driver directly impacts how the system as a whole behaves.

As a life-long Labour voter, the irony of this in relation to our current political system did not go unnoticed. And as an eminent scientist once said, ‘It’s quantum physics – the action of the individual determines the direction of the whole system.’