How do you Choose your Queue?

And what does that say about how you make business decisions?

We’ve all done it, arrived at the supermarket checkout, desperate to get out as fast as possible, only to be faced with the need to make a decision about which line to join.  And, you have to decide quickly; hesitate too long and someone else jumps in, changing the whole dynamic.  I don’t know about you, but almost without fail, I pick the wrong one. The ‘short’ line turns out to have the world’s slowest cashier, or the customer with a stack of coupons, or someone who starts searching for and counting out their coins. 

It’s a small reminder that most decisions are made with incomplete information. We glance, we guess, and sometimes we just get unlucky – or lucky. 

Curiously, when it’s not a neat line, such as a crowd at ticket gates or a busy bar, I tend to do much better. I’ve learned to work the edges, where flow is often faster. That’s less about chance and more about recognising how systems move. 

There’s an interesting distinction here. Choosing the ‘right’ queue is really a tactical decision;  you’re working with imperfect data, trying to make the best call under uncertainty. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t. But recognising the edge effect in crowds is more strategic - you’ve noticed a pattern in how the system behaves, and you position yourself accordingly. 

And here’s the twist: when I do bother to look more closely at the queue, how efficient the cashier seems, how ‘decisive’ the customers look, my odds improve dramatically. I make a better choice because I’ve chosen to pay attention to the signals that matter and see the systemic effect, rather than just the surface-level metric of queue length. 

Business decisions aren’t so different. Leaders can agonise over tactical calls with hidden variables (which sales lead to call back first when you’ve got limited time in the afternoon, which minor product tweak to roll out first when customer feedback is mixed); this is important, but you may not have all the information available in the moment to make the best decision and so sometimes you will just pick the ‘wrong queue’. But the real payoff comes from noticing systemic effects over time - the dynamics of the various players in the queuing ‘system’, where and why bottlenecks form, where flow accelerates, where opportunities open at the edges, and positioning yourself with that in mind.  And armed with that, you can make much better tactical decisions. 

Maybe the moral of the story is that in the end, it’s less about finding the perfect queue and more about noticing the patterns that shape outcomes. And that’s where strategy begins. 

Ad Futurum

Graham