There's a town in Germany called Bohmte that had a traffic problem. They removed road signs, signals, and lane controls in key areas and moved to a shared street model.
Most people expected chaos. Instead, safety improved. A similar Dutch town using the same approach reported a 50 percent drop in accidents.
The Experiment
Road signs, curbs, sidewalks, traffic lights, lane markings — all gone. Cars, trucks, pedestrians, and bicyclists now share one continuous space. No rules. No signals. No lines telling you where to go.
Everyone predicted chaos. The opposite happened.
That result is what makes the story useful. In some systems, less control creates better behavior.
Why It Worked
When the rules disappeared, people had to think. They had to pay attention. They couldn't rely on a green light to tell them it was safe — they had to actually look. Drivers started stopping and gesturing for pedestrians to cross without any signals telling them to.
The structure had been creating overreliance. People followed the rules instead of using their judgment. Remove the structure, and people became more aware, more careful, more engaged.
The Project Management Parallel
This is exactly what happens in most workplaces. We add rules and processes to prevent problems. But the rules create their own problems — people stop thinking and start following. They update the ticket because the process says to, not because it helps. They attend the meeting because it's on the calendar, not because they need to.
The processes that were supposed to help people coordinate end up replacing the coordination itself. People follow the process instead of thinking about what actually needs to happen.
Less Can Be More
Nobody would propose "remove all the traffic controls" as a solution. It sounds insane. It sounds like giving up. But sometimes the comfortable answer — more rules, more structure, more controls — is wrong. Sometimes less really is more.
The next time your team has a coordination problem, before adding another process, ask: "What would happen if we removed something instead?"