Friday, December 9, 2016

Paul's Update Special 12/9





A behavioral understanding of how scarcity diminishes our decision making and control

Kelly Monahan, Mark Cotteleer, Jen Fisher, July 19, 2016

Sorry to bring up something so painful, but think about your most recent misstep at work. In the course of apologizing, you might well have blamed a lack of time and resources—and there is an excellent chance, that’s precisely the culprit. All too often, a state of scarcity can cause talented professionals to do dumb things.

We all make mistakes, of course, but unusual time pressure can make even the smartest person seem incompetent. Why? As new research suggests, we have a finite capacity for making good decisions, and a state of scarcity may deplete us of the limited capacity we have. We’ve all been there: Lack of time—or some other resource—can create a sense of anxiety that can end in poor decision making. 

Scarcity is a common and often-overlooked organizational barrier to achieving optimal performance. Leaders should recognize scarcity for what it is and find ways to overcome it so that everyone can do their jobs to the best of their ability.

Experiencing a state of scarcity can be the equivalent of a major unseen interruption, as powerful as a physical distraction. Recent behavioral science research illustrates how scarcity creates a mind-set in which individuals unconsciously focus on urgent, unmet needs, letting other considerations slide.

Nearly everyone suffers time crunches, but time is only one source of scarcity—attention deficits may come from a lack of money, collaboration, food, companionship, or any other valuable resource. Scarcity can be a hidden distractor that constantly pulls cognition away from other important but less urgent needs.

What managers should consider understanding is how scarcity compromises a person’s decision-making capabilities by depleting her finite capacity for self-control and intelligence. When she makes bad choices, it doesn’t necessarily indicate incompetence. Rather, circumstances may have exhausted her overall capability, creating a nearly impossible setting for making rational choices. The scarcity phenomenon can help explain the ways that people living paycheck to paycheck handle their expenses, how an overcommitted executive can’t stop texting and taking calls at his child’s sporting event, and why dieters may perform worse than nondieters on some cognitive tests. The bottom line is that each of us suffers a scarcity mind-set at some point, and understanding ways to mitigate its impact can help maintain and improve performance across multiple dimensions.

Some hopeful guides are emerging, bolstered by research, to help leaders combat the effects of scarcity in the workplace. It turns out that an organization can turn slack—traditionally regarded as a mere byproduct of low productivity—to its advantage, using it to improve outcomes. Indeed, managers and employees can build slack into their daily activities to mitigate the consequences of scarcity.

Here are three ways that scarcity can wreak havoc on our minds:

  1. It constantly interrupts our thinking
  2. It creates an intense focus on the unmet need
  3. It exhausts the mind with constant trade-off decisions and creates a myopic view of the world

As a form of internal disruption, scarcity creates constant distractions that pull us away from engaging in higher-level thinking. Researchers Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir summarize: “Scarcity itself also captures attention via a bottom-up process. This is what we mean when we say it is involuntary, happening below conscious control. As a result, scarcity, too—like trains or sudden noises—can pull us away even when we are trying to focus elsewhere.”

The impact of distraction can be profound. In one telling natural experiment, researchers sought to determine the impact noise-based distraction had on academic performance. At a middle school in New Haven, CT, one side of the building was situated next to train tracks; the other was not. Students attending classes on the track-side, exposed to the constant sound of rattling trains, tested a full year behind their classmates on the quieter side. After the school installed noise pads, students on both sides performed at the same level. Here, what’s astounding is not that noises can impact performance—that’s well-known—but the magnitude by which they can do so.

Of course, there can be benefits to experiencing a temporary state of scarcity. While persistent, chronic scarcity robs us of our cognitive capacity, short-term scarcity can help people focus on urgent, unmet needs—in short, what is most important. Consider the power of a deadline: As it approaches, time becomes scarce and anxiety grows. Yet often, an individual meets that challenge by developing focus that enables her to complete the task on time. Stress can force us to push harder and even grow—even if, when not coupled with rest or the ability to oscillate back to a state of slack, it can cause long-run harm.

Scarcity can also create expertise. Research has found that low-income neighborhood grocery store shoppers are less likely than others to be enticed by marketing gimmicks—instead, they focus on value and are more likely to evaluate food prices by cost per unit. Given their limited financial resources, these shoppers are typically more aware of a dollar’s absolute value and exhibit more rational economic thinking than higher-income shoppers, who often rely on environmental cues to choose what to buy.

Not only does scarcity create noisy interruptions to our top-down thinking—the presence of unmet needs can actually become all-consuming and crowd out other concerns. 

Research findings suggest that our brains are wired for survival and instinctively focus on what we lack. While in the near term this can have its advantages, persistent scarcity creates mental bandwidth limitations. This is because as visceral needs intensify and persist, a conflict emerges between what one is driven to do vs. what one believes is the best choice. Scarcity compels the brain to focus on the urgent, often neglecting the important. 

As we grapple with the constant pull of the urgent unmet need, we begin to exhaust the mind’s finite resources. Scarcity amplifies this by demanding constant trade-off decisions and distorting our view of the future.

A scarcity mind-set forces individuals to confront nearly constant, and often painful, trade-off decisions. Constant trade-offs deplete mental reserves, creating a cascade of effects leading to reduced self-control, lack of cognitive vigilance, and ultimately, poorer decision making.

The phenomenon is well documented in the form of decision fatigue: Decisions become increasingly difficult to make throughout the day, as your mental resources become depleted. However, unlike physical fatigue, we tend to be much less consciously aware of how low our mental reserves have become. In this state, we are much more prone to make irrational trade-off decisions.

Research further suggests that scarcity-induced decision fatigue can lead to irrational discounting of future consequences. When we are faced with constant trade-off decisions, rather than rationally sorting through choices at hand, we often begin to exhibit “hyperbolic discounting of future costs.” In essence, we become susceptible to delay discounting—a readiness to take a dramatically lower payoff now instead of waiting for a much larger reward in the future.

Simultaneously, we may fall prey to a planning fallacy—convincing ourselves that a particular task will take less time in the future than it will now. 

A key, easier-said-than-done approach to dealing with scarcity is to create slack in the relevant system.  Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir use the analogy of a suitcase:

Imagine packing for an extended trip with only a very small suitcase. Your friend, on the other hand, packs with a much larger one. Your friend has room for all the essentials while also having extra space to address contingencies. You, on the other hand, are forced to make numerous trade-off decisions about what to bring. You have no room for extras. As a result, you are required to make predictions about future needs—which behavioral research suggests you will not be good at—such as should you bring a raincoat or an extra pair of shoes. You friend is able to bring these things “just in case.” In essence, the slack capacity afforded by your friend’s larger suitcase dramatically simplifies their planning (and ultimately enjoyment) relative to yours for the same trip. 

In many settings, slack is seen as a negative, a waste of organizational resources. (Why would anyone carry around a too-large suitcase?) However, even in industrial settings, slack—in the form of excess capacity—can support overall performance in key ways. An exploration of buffer capacity in production and health care settings illustrates this concept.

Even more important, today’s knowledge economy requires an evaluation of the role of slack in the system. A behaviorally grounded perspective on slack would see it as a necessary component for the creation of individual and organizational change, agility, and creativity. In this view, organizations that are designed to operate at maximum efficiency may be excellent at day-to-day execution but may achieve this at the cost of never having time to consider the future. Indeed, in one study, an organization streamlined its daily operations at the cost of leaving employees feeling uncertain about their future growth, which resulted in decreased engagement and performance. This is likely why researchers have proposed that short-term efficiency gains can actually reduce long-term competitive positioning.  Slack allows individuals and organizations the time to grow, adapt, and change.

While slack is important, it must be managed. The leader’s challenge is to cultivate the right amount of slack in a system without letting it turn into an excuse for laziness, wasted resources, and underperformance. 

Organizations that are designed to operate at maximum efficiency may be excellent at day-to-day execution but may achieve this at the cost of never having time to consider the future. Here are some action items leaders can enact to productively use slack to combat scarcity (without going too far).

An obvious remedy for fatigue: Do less of whatever activity is making you tired. Any decision, even a small one, draws upon a finite mental account that ultimately could wind up depleted at a critical time. Eliminating those less important choices, or deferring them to others, can leave you or your team better prepared to make thoughtful and smart big decisions when they arise.

On a related note, not only might individuals face far too many decisions throughout their day—they may engage in other activities that add little or no value and deplete mental resources. Often, nonessential tasks dominate the workplace, with meaningful activities getting inadequate attention. Too often, we measure productivity by one’s ability to multitask and juggle competing priorities, leading to little progress in any direction. 

The conclusion is simple: A mindful approach to both the number of decisions made and the number of activities in which one engages can help create slack and reduce overall mental depletion. This begins by prioritizing tasks and setting aside—or delegating—inessential ones.

Physical and mental exertion both take their toll. The bottom line is that “doing less” by incorporating recovery periods may actually increase productivity by leaving individuals with greater mental reserves with which to approach issues and solve problems.

Demand uncertainty is a fact of life, whether that demand is for products, time, money, or any other valuable resource. Where uncertainty is an issue, as previously discussed, buffer capacity often plays a strategic role. The bottom line is that leaders and individuals alike may need to proactively create slack to prepare for the predictably unexpected event that will eventually occur. However, innate biases with respect to the way we manage uncertainty over time can make building this capacity a challenge. Two tactics—pre-commitment and effort segmentation—can help.

With pre-commitment, individuals build slack over time by immediately committing to something small and easy that will, in the long term, turn into something substantial. Effort segmentation is a tactic that helps combat individuals’ optimistic bias—our belief that future tasks will take less time to complete than they actually will. Research shows that it is easier to remain overly optimistic when a deadline or event is further out in the future than when it is imminent and key obstacles are more visible. In order to avoid inducing scarcity due to a misjudgment of required effort, consider breaking important long-term efforts into smaller interim segments that can be sequentially attacked. Doing so can promote a greater tendency toward vigilance of effort and can result in improved outcomes. 

OVERCOMING A SCARCITY MIND-SET

So: Does scarcity make us dumb? Not really. But a scarcity mind-set can clearly position individuals and organizations to make bad choices, with potentially severe consequences. It is in every leader’s interest to consider the susceptibility of their co-workers and themselves to such thinking.

A key antidote for the scarcity mind-set is the creation of slack, a buffer for the uncertainties that make scarcity such a consuming mental challenge. Beyond a basic concern for the point at which slack could potentially become wasteful, leaders need to consider strategies that can preserve mental capacity for the truly important choices that must be made. To that end, managers should consider the following:

  • Define and clearly communicate the core mission and the accompanying priorities and goals. Often both managers and employees find themselves in a state of scarcity because they lack clarity about bigger-picture goals and mission and instead focus almost exclusively on putting out each day’s fires.
  • Evaluate timing: Plan to make critical decisions at times when mental capacity is high, not in an exhausted state, such as immediately after an important conference or client meeting. Make adjustments as necessary to avoid burnout.
  • Once the mission is set, evaluate where decisions are currently made, and consider ways to better distribute decision making so as not to exceed key players’ capacity.
  • Acknowledge and build in the need for mental rest. Since back-to-back cognitively intense activities are depleting, schedule in buffer and recovery time that allows individuals time to either restore or catch up.
  • Evaluate and find other ways to build slack into your daily operations.
  • To minimize distraction and interruption, set aside a time and place that allows for intentional focus on a particular task. Consider putting up an away message while working on an important task and unplugging from both Internet and phone for a short period of time.
  • Pre-commit to the building of slack.
  • Fight the tendency to be overly optimistic about future demands by breaking larger projects into smaller, near-term commitments.
Five ways to create slack in your day
  • Start your day off right: Take the time to define and prioritize your daily goals, and refer back to those goals throughout the day to ensure alignment.
  • Create meeting buffers: Reduce meeting times to 25 or 50 minutes to create time to reset before moving onto the next meeting or task.
  • Schedule focused work time: During this time, turn off your email and your phone so that you can give your full attention to the task at hand.
  • Take breaks: Schedule time to mentally recover. This means stepping away from your work to get up and move around or practice deep breathing to center yourself.
  • Meditate daily: Just a few minutes a day can provide a wide array of mental and physical benefits.

In the end, knowledge work requires mental capacity, and that capacity, for any person, is finite. In order to increase long-run success, organizations will need to manage that capacity by helping employees at all levels avoid lapsing into a scarcity mind-set that depletes their ability to make good choices. It would be dumb to do otherwise.

Endnotes

  • Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives (New York: Times Books, 2013). View in article
  • Karl E. Weick, “The vulnerable system: An analysis of the Tenerife air disaster,” Journal of Management 16(3), 1990, pp. 571–93. View in article
  • Ibid. View in article
  • Mark J. Cotteleer and Elliot Bendoly, Stop or not: How behavioral factors affect decisions related to work interruptions, Deloitte University Press, December 5, 2015, http://dupress.com/articles/managing-digital-distractions-in-workplace/. View in article
  • Kathleen D. Vohs and Todd F. Heatherton, “Self-regulatory failure: A resource-depletion approach,” Psychological Science 11(3), 2000, pp. 249–54. View in article
  • Edward E. Jones and Victor A. Harris, “The attribution of attitudes,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 3(1), 1967, pp. 1–24. View in article
  • Mullainathan and Shafir, Scarcity. View in article
  • Ibid., p. 60. View in article
  • John Sweller, “Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning,” Cognitive Science 12(2), 1988, pp. 257–85. View in article
  • Carsten N. Boehler et al., “Task-load-dependent activation of dopaminergic midbrain areas in the absence of reward,” Journal of Neuroscience 31(13), 2011, pp. 4955–61. View in article
  • Arline L. Bronzaft, “The effect of a noise abatement program on reading ability,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 1(3), 1981, pp. 215–22. View in article
  • Leah M. Kalm and Richard D. Semba, “They starved so that others be better fed: Remembering Ancel Keys and the Minnesota Experiment,” Journal of Nutrition 135(6), 2005, p. 1349, http://jn.nutrition.org/content/135/6/1347.full.pdf. View in article
  • George Loewenstein, “Emotions in economic theory and economic behavior,” Preferences, Behavior, and Welfare 90(2), May 2000, pp. 426–32. View in article
  • Isabel Maria Rosa-Diaz, “Price knowledge: Effects of consumers’ attitudes towards prices, demographics, and socio-cultural characteristics,” Journal of Product and Brand Management 13(6), 2004, pp. 406–28, http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/10610420410560307. View in article
  • Roy F. Baumeister, “The psychology of irrationality,” in Isabelle Brocas and Juan D. Carrillo (eds.), The Psychology of Economic Decisions: Rationality and Well-Being (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 1–15. View in article
  • Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (New York: Penguin Books, 2012). View in article
  • Gal Zauberman and John G. Lynch, Jr., “Resource slack and propensity to discount delayed investments of time vs. money,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 134(1), 2005, pp. 23–37. View in article
  • Ibid. View in article
  • Seonaidh McDonald, “Innovation, organizational learning, and models of slack,” presented at Lancaster University Organizational Learning and Knowledge Fifth International conference, May 30, 2003. View in article
  • Mullainathan and Shafir, Scarcity. View in article
  • McDonald, “Innovation, organizational learning, and models of slack.” View in article
  • Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork and the Myth of Total Efficiency (New York: Broadway Books, 2002). View in article
  • Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace (New York: Perigee/Penguin, 2014). View in article
  • Susan Reynolds Fisher and Margaret A. White, “Downsizing in a learning organization: Are there hidden costs?” Academy of Management Review 25(1), 2000, pp. 244–51. View in article
  • The authors, one of whom has a long history in supply chain and operations management research, hasten to add that slack, in the form of safety stock and surge capacity, remains an important part of the operations toolset in contexts where demand for resources is uncertain. Furthermore, preventative maintenance—planned downtime to prepare equipment for future demands—is a critical responsibility for operations managers. View in article
  • Mullainathan and Shafir argue in one blog post that the availability of too much slack can lead the organization to a lack of vigilance, creating a new scarcity cycle when the unexpected happens. See “Scarcity: Taking care of my own business,” How to Tacomob, November 5, 2014, http://takingcareofmyownbusiness.com/2014/11/05/scarcity-by-sendhil-mullainathan-and-elder-shafir/. View in article
  • Michael Lewis, “Obama’s way,” Vanity Fair, September 11, 2012, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2012/10/michael-lewis-profile-barack-obama. View in article
  • Julian Birkinshaw and Jordan Cohen, “Make time for the work that matters,” Harvard Business Review, September 2013, http://hbr.org/2013/09/make-time-for-the-work-that-matters/ar/1. View in article
  • Tom Hodson, Jeff Schwarz, Ardie van Berkel, and Ian Winstrom Otten, The overwhelmed employee: Simplify the work environment, Deloitte University Press, March 7, 2014, http://dupress.com/articles/hc-trends-2014-overwhelmed-employee/. View in article
  • Birkinshaw and Cohen, “Make time for the work that matters”; for a more thorough discussion on simplifying the workplace, see Hodson et al., The overwhelmed employee and James Guszcza, Josh Bersin, and Jeff Schwartz, “HR for humans: How behavioral economics can reinvent HR,” Deloitte Review 18, January 25, 2016, http://dupress.com/articles/behavioral-economics-evidence-based-hr-management/. View in article
  • Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (New York: Crown Business, 2014). View in article
  • Ibid. View in article
  • Evan Robinson, “Why crunch mode doesn’t work: Six lessons,” International Game Developers Association, 2005, http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons. View in article
  • Ibid. View in article
  • J. Parra et al., “The distribution of rest periods affects performance and adaptations of energy metabolism induced by high-intensity training in human muscle,” Acta Physiologica 169(2), 2000, pp. 157–65. View in article
  • Richard H. Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi, “Save more tomorrow: Using behavioral economics to increase employee saving,” Journal of Political Economy 112(1), 2004, pp. 164–86, http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/richard.thaler/research/pdf/SMarTJPE.pdf. View in article
  • Roger Buehler and Dale Griffin, “Planning, personality, and prediction: The role of future focus in optimistic time predictions,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 92(1–2), 2003, pp. 80–90. View in article
  • For further discussion of decision making, see Derek M. Pankratz and Michael A. Roberto, “Crossing the mental Rubicon: Don’t let decisiveness backfire,” Deloitte Review 18, January 25, 2016, http://dupress.com/articles/dont-let-decisiveness-in-leadership-backfire/. View in article
  • Buehler and Griffin, “Planning, personality, and prediction.” View in article
  • For a more thorough discussion on breaking tasks into smaller segments, see Cotteleer and Bendoly, Stop or not, Deloitte University Press, December 5, 2014, http://dupress.com/articles/managing-digital-distractions-in-workplace/. View in article
  • Wallace J. Hopp and Mark L. Spearman, Factory Physics, Third Ed., (Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2011). View in article
  • Sheree Crute, “Case study: Flow management at St. John’s Regional Health Center,” Quality Matters, Commonwealth Fund, 2005. View in article



I cannot recollect, in 30 years of work, a single PowerPoint presentation I saw or gave that altered the course of anything. Yet in meeting after meeting around the world, PowerPoint is the medium of choice. When I helped start a social innovation organization called Civilla, in partnership with Adam and Lena Selzer, we gave ourselves an operating constraint: There would be no PowerPoint. None.

But saying no to something is easy. Figuring out what takes its place is harder.

We remember standing in front of a blank whiteboard as we began to think through how we might communicate some very complex information. We had recently completed four months of analyzing Michigan’s public benefit system, which distributes over $18 billion in Medicaid, food, and child care assistance to over a million residents on an annual basis. Important work — but it required people to complete a 40-page eligibility form, the longest of its kind in America. Michigan’s government asked us to imagine a new way to deliver benefits that was more humane and efficient, so we rolled up our sleeves and used an approach called human-centered design to figure out a better method for both caseworkers and residents. We thought we had found one, but how could we communicate it without everyone’s favorite slide deck program?

We knew we had to capture the minds and hearts of the state’s leaders if we were going to be persuasive. We needed to bring our insights, data, ideas, and stories to life. With PowerPoint off the table, we turned to a different suite of tools: foam core, duct tape, fishing line, photographs, rope, twine, and papier-mâché. We used these tools to build a large installation that activated multiple human senses and delivered our results in an interactive, meaningful way.

As we brought our presentation to life, we relied on three methods that can benefit any team choosing to say no to PowerPoint.

Immerse the Audience

PowerPoint asks your audience to learn by listening. We wanted our audience to learn by doing. We knew from research that experiential learning outperforms passive instruction, so we converted our hallway into a public benefit office that simulated the environment that caseworkers and residents experience every day. We had our audience, Michigan’s leaders, experience the reality of residents and caseworkers by having them sit in that “office” and complete the 40-page form. We even played recorded office background noise of people talking, typing, and shuffling papers as they worked. When the simulation was over, I recall one leader saying, “I had no idea of the complexity until I was filling it out myself.”

Leverage the Power of Scale

With PowerPoint, the size of the presentation is constrained by the technology or the screen size. Free from those constraints, we decided to use scale as a key tool in delivering our content — and we went big.

To leave our audience with no doubt about whom the project was in service of, we created portraits of residents and caseworkers to orient the conversation.

To bring to life the insight that residents felt there was no clear path for them when they entered the public benefit system, we produced a 10-foot-high photograph of a seemingly infinite maze. And instead of a single slide of the ethnographic journey for residents and caseworkers, we created a 100-foot journey map that became a walking storyboard.

As we led leaders past these dramatically oversized objects, we heard them say things like “I’ve never realized…” and “I see the problem in a new way…” These fresh insights and dialogue were a direct result of our choice to break out of PowerPoint’s scale.

Use Symbolism

PowerPoint encourages presenters to rely on a slide’s literal content instead of abstraction or symbolism, which are often more memorable and thought provoking and foster empathy. We wanted to communicate the overwhelming client-to-caseworker ratio. The caseworkers we talked to feel this deeply, as they navigated so many pages for so many clients. The high volume takes a toll on the caseworker’s heart and soul. They want to help residents but feel stretched too thin. We used papier-mâché to create a series of shrinking hearts and hung them in sequence. We brought the heavy caseloads to life with 750 dangling ropes, each one symbolizing a client. Our visitors had to walk through and spread apart the maze of 10-foot-long ropes to navigate the immersive experience.

We also took the 40-page benefit form, cut out every redundancy, crossed out every line of legal text, and displayed what remained so that the audience could step back, contemplate, and use their imagination.

At the end of the visit, one state leader said it was the most powerful meeting he had been to in 32 years. With simple tools, creativity, and elbow grease, we made our content come alive. When we ditched PowerPoint, we created something that was able to speak to both the head and the heart. We pushed our audience to change the way public benefits are accessed and delivered in Michigan by piloting a new form that is 80% shorter.

The physical act of walking someone through your work is powerful. Think about: standing and strolling versus sitting. Interaction versus passive observation. Tactile materials versus pixels. Story versus spreadsheet. Symbols versus data points. Stories rooted in people versus statistics. These are shifts that move audiences to action, that engage the mind and heart to effect change.



Leaders of the American Center for Mobility testing site for driverless cars formally kicked off construction of the planned $80 million project, saying Michigan will be competitive in a race for a federal autonomous vehicle testing designation. By December 2017, the mobility center's administrators hope to open a 2.5-mile highway loop as part of the project's first phase. Construction will begin in earnest in the spring, said John Maddox, the center's CEO.

The highway track will be funded with $20 million in startup funding from the Michigan Strategic Fund, a division of the Michigan Economic Development Corp. Supporters still need to raise another $60 million from the federal government or the private sector, though Maddox and members of Michigan's congressional delegation said private funding is more likely.

"We are moving on the assumption that federal money is difficult to get," said U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., adding that designation of a national testing lab likely would attract new private investment, including from automotive companies with deep pockets.

Maddox said he already is talking with private companies about investment, though he wouldn't name them. The prospect of a public-private partnership related to mobility and autonomous vehicles is "resonating" throughout the industry, he said.

Michigan's efforts are gaining notoriety overseas, too. Several people involved with the project said Monday that the U.S. faces stiff industry competition from countries in Europe and Asia, which makes projects like the American Center for Mobility more urgent.

Besides the highway loop, which is expected to help automakers test driverless vehicles at speeds of 55-75 mph, the American Center for Mobility is expected to include an urban grid with intersections, buildings and pedestrian crossings and campus buildings for research and development, Maddox said.

By Lindsay VanHulle, Crain's Detroit Business

(I wonder if this is too late? I saw an article about the Otto Trucking firm ignoring Utah State law and testing a self driving truck on public highways to demonstrate it's viability. That test led to laws being passed in two other states allowing the company to operate.)

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