Red Test

Traffic lights coordinate all of us, extremely well, with only a visual vocabulary. We go to our driving schools as teenagers and understand pretty quickly what the light means across a wide variety of experiences, because across those experiences the light distills everything going on around it into simple rules of thumb.

No words, just three colors, and somehow endless amounts of strangers approach one another in thousands of pounds of machinery and largely understand what everyone else is likely to do when they look at that light swaying in the wind. Nobody needs the light to explain itself, even though it will sometimes have extra explanatory stuff (turn arrow, some bus-related addition, etc.). Try living in Seattle and see some very weird things jammed into the lights, like criss-crossing arrows.

There is something powerful about a language becoming small. Basic. It's like pointing. Everybody on earth, more or less, pretty much knows what pointing your finger at something means.

Take away the traffic light itself, and even the color set of Red, Yellow, Green is its own kind of language. I've used versions of R/Y/G for years, sometimes quite formally and sometimes because saying “hmmm, this feels Yellow” can accomplish more than pages of emails or chats debating something. The colors compress. Human stuff like confidence, risk, attention, if help or attention is needed, is distilled into something you can use.

That compression forces something: judgment.

A traffic light is automatic, doing its thing second by second, anticipating nothing. Red to Green to Yellow and back again. But very little in human life is that automatic, even if we wish it might be otherwise. Apply those same three colors to something less compressible than traffic, and almost immediately the colors lose all the clarity they get from a natural sequence of the clock turning over. Somebody has to say "Red."

Traffic lights have no reputation to protect. Nobody really questions the longevity of a Green light, whereas people have their history, judgment, credibility, and pride in whatever they or someone else is now coloring Red. And Red in that context is loaded and pulls out memories of how everyone responded the last time something was Red.

I first heard some version of this called the Red Test from someone who had spent time at Bridgewater, a firm (in)famous for its radical-transparency machinery and its stated commitment to truth-telling. In the years since, I've tried to find more about it that isn't just self-congratulatory recruiting marketing, and the only thing I could find was a podcast where someone explained the important part of the entire idea, which was the answer to: what happens after somebody says Red?

The answer was: something serious, people move toward the problem, every time. And the organization grants the ability to stop what you're doing and fix the Red back to Green. Or so it was claimed. So it seemed like some adherence to a standard and then a ruthlessness in enforcing it.

If that were true, I doubt many people would need very many repetitions before learning what the color scale means at Bridgewater, a localized meaning different from what those same colors mean in the traffic lights on their drive home.

When people work well together, small, simple language does a lot of the lifting: inside jokes, a nod, a look, etc. What moves cars around? Small language. Red: stop. Green: go. Yellow: either go, or stop, but do it fast. Everybody is skipping the part where everyone has to agree on the definition and gets right to the part where enough people intuitively agree on what the response should likely be, often without ever having to say anything.

R/Y/G gets borrowed so often but works so unevenly because we default to thinking "this is useful to cars, and I need to simplify xyz complex system, so I'll bring this over here." But the test it has to pass is: can this communicate some idea from one head to another, easily? A lot of times it can't. The colors are the easiest part, but take them out of traffic context and they don't come pre-loaded with any useful shortcuts to agreement. Traffic lights get a lot of that agreement baked in for free. Red changes who moves. Green changes who moves. For two out of the three colors, there is no negotiation across the wide spectrum of human interests and incentives.

The Red Test, which is how I remember the Bridgewater thing but who knows if they call it that, boils down to something like this: does saying Red actually change what happens next, and does everyone basically know what happens next?^[1]

Three colors can carry an enormous amount. Millions of vehicles move around every day thanks to three colors, and that's because Yellow can't get too roomy at the intersection.