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50 parkruns done, and the same thought every time.
At 9am on a Saturday, hundreds of strangers gather in a park to run together (normally 1,500 in my local run in Bushy Park). I've spent most of my life avoiding running and avoiding people talking about running even more. But I now do both most weeks. And what I've noticed more than the endorphins is how all these strangers get together and somehow, every single week, everyone is kind to each other and the operation works extremely efficiently. People chat to strangers, nobody pushes, nobody cheats, nobody's awful. Why? Because the system is set up to bring out the best in people.
When Jimmy Wales built Wikipedia, he made the first rule 'assume good faith'. Assume that contributors are coming from a good place and trying to help and you create a system in which people, mostly, play nice. He tells this story brilliantly in 'Seven Rules of Trust'.People behave with almost universal kindness and empathy at parkrun because the system brings out the best in them, not because they are natural saints or being policed into good behaviour. The system creates the culture. The same people - myself very much included - do not behave so well in other systems.
Which is a clunking segue from 9am Saturday to Monday morning and the world of work. Do the best results come from policing people into better behaviour or from designing systems that make good behaviour the natural path? The best organisations create systems in which people can lean into their better natures and be instinctively supportive and collaborative. Team performance doesn’t then rely on micromanagement and interventions from above.
The British Army famously pushes decision making down to the lowest level capable of making that decision. In the right system, people look after themselves, their colleagues and the organisation as a whole. The right culture builds from the bottom up. Leaders don’t create the culture, but they do create the system in which the culture naturally evolves, good or bad. And at 9am every Saturday, that culture is unquestionably good.
PS if you’ve never walked or run a parkrun do try it, just once. The people are lovely.
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