Phase Transition: What Traffic Jams Teach Us About Office Politics

Chakraborty opens with the familiar mystery of a highway suddenly turning into a parking lot of stopped cars with no visible cause — no accident, no obstruction — and uses it to introduce the physics concept of phase transition. He argues that organisations behave the same way: pressure accumulates invisibly until one small additional input flips the system from cooperative-flow to gridlock. The piece reframes office politics not as the work of bad actors but as an emergent property of crowded, high-friction systems crossing a threshold.