🚦 The First Intersection Principle
2026-06-22 · Freedom on the road. Order at every intersection.
The Question That Haunted Me
There was a question that troubled me for many years.
Why do conflicts seem inevitable whenever people work or live together? Teams fall into internal friction. Couples argue. Friends drift apart. Business partners disagree. Even people who begin with genuine goodwill can eventually part on bad terms.
So we study people.
We study personality, emotional intelligence, leadership, communication skills, and human nature. It seems that if we can just understand people well enough, all these problems will disappear.
But the more we studied people, the more complicated everything became. Instead of finding answers, we found ourselves even less certain about what to do.
It wasn't until recently that I had a realization:
Maybe we've been looking in the wrong direction from the very beginning.
A New Discovery
Hello, I'm Chao Wan (Leafer), creator of the open-source graphics engine LeaferJS.
Today I'd like to share a discovery that puzzled me for years before suddenly making everything click.
The idea is surprisingly simple—so simple that it came from watching a traffic intersection.
Yet it completely changed how I think about teams, collaboration, friendships, and even family relationships.
I call it:
The First Intersection Principle.
It explains why conflicts between people are not only inevitable—but also surprisingly simple to reduce once we understand where they truly come from.
My Own Story
Let me begin with my own experience.
Many people know that I've spent the past several years building LeaferJS.
For a long time, I was hesitant to collaborate with others. It wasn't because I disliked working with people. Quite the opposite.
I've always admired teams that create great things together, grow together, and accomplish what no individual could achieve alone.
What I feared wasn't collaboration itself.
I feared failed collaboration.
I worried about relationships breaking down and both sides getting hurt.
I'm also naturally introverted and never considered myself particularly good at dealing with people. So over the past few years, I chose the harder path:
I built LeaferJS largely by myself.
From the core architecture to the rendering engine, from feature design to community maintenance, nearly everything was done alone—work that would normally require a team of dozens.
Looking back, my greatest gain wasn't technical knowledge.
It was discovering that human potential is far greater than we usually imagine.
How that potential can be unlocked is a topic I'd like to write about another day.
At the same time, however, I became increasingly aware of another truth:
No matter how capable one person is, there are limits.
If LeaferJS is going to go further, it will need more people.
It will need an organization.
It will need collaboration.
And that has become the most urgent problem I need to solve.
Searching for an Answer
Over the years, I've read countless books about management, leadership, and organizational design.
They discuss important topics such as trust, culture, vision, motivation, and values.
None of these ideas are wrong.
Yet I always felt something was missing.
Something felt unnecessarily complicated.
Eventually I realized why.
Almost all of these theories focus on the same subject:
People.
How to manage people.
How to motivate people.
How to change people.
How to understand people.
But here's the problem:
People are the most complex part of any system.
Someone who agrees with you today may think differently tomorrow.
Someone full of passion today may lose direction in the future.
Even the strongest relationships can change over time.
If a system depends on people remaining stable, then the system itself is fragile.
For years, one question kept returning to my mind:
Is there a way to build collaboration that doesn't depend on people being predictable?
I thought about that question for years.
Then one day, while waiting at a traffic light, the answer suddenly appeared.
1. What a Traffic Light Taught Me
There was nothing unusual about that day.
I was simply waiting at a red light, watching cars pass through the intersection.
Then I noticed something fascinating.
None of these drivers knew one another.
They weren't communicating.
They had no emotional connection, no shared history, and no foundation of trust.
Many of them would never meet again.
Yet they were collaborating—and doing so remarkably well.
Dozens of vehicles approached from different directions, crossed paths, separated again, and continued on their way.
Everything happened in an orderly flow.
No scrambling.
No chaos.
No endless negotiation.
Even more remarkable, this same collaboration happens every single day, all over the world.
Billions of strangers participate in it, and it has continued to work for more than a century.
At that moment, something suddenly became clear to me.
Human relationships are much like a network of intersections, and the traffic light is the most important element that makes those intersections work.
2. Where Conflicts Really Begin
What does a traffic light actually manage?
Most people would say it manages traffic.
But if you look carefully, you'll notice that's not quite true.
A traffic light manages only one place:
The intersection.
It doesn't care who you are.
It doesn't care what you drive.
It doesn't care where you came from or where you're going.
It cares about only one thing:
When people traveling in different directions meet, how can conflict be avoided so that everyone can continue toward their destination?
That realization made me look at the entire traffic system differently.
I discovered that the real challenge has never been the vehicles themselves.
The challenge lies where their paths intersect.
Because an intersection is where multiple directions, multiple goals, and multiple intentions exist at the same time.
And that is exactly where conflict is born.
3. What If Traffic Lights Disappeared?
Imagine that every traffic light vanished overnight.
What would happen?
Everyone would constantly have to decide:
Who goes first? Who should yield? Who's in a greater hurry? Who's more aggressive?
Every encounter would become a new negotiation.
On the surface, people would still be driving.
But in reality, everyone would be trying to predict everyone else.
You wonder whether they'll yield.
They wonder whether you'll push through.
Everyone is forced to deal with uncertainty.
The most interesting part is this:
There may not be a single bad person involved.
Everyone simply wants to pass through the intersection safely.
Yet the system slows down.
Traffic builds up.
Eventually, it begins to lose control.
That's when I realized something important:
What consumes a system isn't conflict itself. It's the uncertainty that exists before conflict occurs.
4. A Discovery That Changed My Thinking
For a long time, I believed that trust was the foundation of collaboration.
Eventually I realized that statement is only half true.
Drivers at an intersection don't actually trust one another—not in the way we normally think about trust.
They don't know who the other drivers are.
They don't know their personalities.
They don't know whether they're reliable.
Yet collaboration still happens.
Why?
Because they don't need to trust one another. They only need to trust the rules.
That was the moment everything clicked.
Trust is not the starting point of collaboration.
Stable collaboration is what gradually creates trust.
The real first step is reducing uncertainty.
When rules are clear and simple, even complete strangers can work together.
And when that collaboration is repeated over and over again, trust naturally begins to emerge.
That sequence is almost the exact opposite of what I used to believe.
5. The First Intersection Principle
Later, I summarized this insight using first-principles thinking into a single sentence:
Most human problems arise where people's paths intersect.
I call this:
The First Intersection Principle.
Another way to express it is this:
Many conflicts aren't caused by flawed people.
They're caused by poorly designed intersections between people.
We're quick to blame individuals.
But many conflicts actually arise from unclear responsibilities, ambiguous boundaries, competing priorities, or missing decision-making mechanisms.
These are not fundamentally people problems.
They're intersection problems.
We spend enormous effort trying to change people.
Very little effort is spent understanding how people connect.
6. I Began to See a Bigger Pattern
As I kept thinking about it, I noticed something remarkable.
The same pattern appears everywhere.
In companies.
In families.
Among friends.
Even in open-source communities.
The real complexity rarely exists within individuals.
It exists in the connections between them.
We spend our time studying employees, leaders, partners, children, and collaborators.
But we rarely study what actually happens when two people meet.
The transportation system isn't remarkable because every driver is exceptional.
It's remarkable because the intersections are well designed.
For the first time, I realized that the heart of a complex system isn't managing individuals.
It's designing the points where they intersect.
7. How Do You Design a Good Intersection?
Eventually, I realized that nearly every collaborative relationship can be understood through the same framework.
Step One: Define a shared destination.
Before anything else, answer a simple question:
Where are we trying to go together?
Step Two: Clarify each person's path.
Understand each individual's goals, then define responsibilities, boundaries, and decision-making authority.
The guiding principle is simple:
Maximum freedom on the road.
Step Three: Identify the inevitable intersections.
Where will people's paths cross?
Resources.
Time.
Decisions.
Distribution of benefits.
These are all intersections.
Step Four: Design clear rules for every intersection.
Every intersection needs to answer just one question:
Who goes first, who waits, and how can both sides continue toward their own goals without blocking each other?
The simpler the rules, the more stable the system becomes.
Step Five: Create mechanisms that protect the rules.
Rules are effective not simply because they exist, but because violating them has consequences.
The purpose isn't to punish people.
It's to ensure the rules remain meaningful.
8. How This Changed Me
For many years, I believed collaboration was inherently complicated.
People are complicated.
Emotions are complicated.
Relationships are complicated.
I could never find a reliable way to make sense of them.
Then I realized something.
Perhaps I'd been looking in the wrong place all along.
I'd spent years trying to understand people.
To persuade them.
To change them.
Yet many problems were never about people in the first place.
They were about the connections between people.
The moment I stopped studying people and started studying the way people connect, many problems that had troubled me for years suddenly became much simpler.
Because I realized this:
People change. Intersections don't.
At last, I had found a new measuring stick.
One that doesn't measure people.
It measures whether the connections between them are well designed.
For the first time, I began to believe that LeaferJS doesn't necessarily need more geniuses to achieve something great.
What matters more may be building a better system of intersections.
Because truly great organizations aren't built merely by extraordinary people.
They're built by a network that allows ordinary people to collaborate consistently and effectively.
Final Thoughts
If there's only one sentence you remember from this article, I hope it's this:
Don't try to manage (or change) people. Design better intersections between people first.
Because more often than not, the problem isn't the people.
It's the intersection.
The key to resisting entropy in complex organizations has never been tighter control or more suffocating management.
It's clearer, simpler, and better-designed intersections.
Finally, picture this:
Cars travel freely along beautiful open roads.
When they briefly meet at an intersection, they follow the shared language of the traffic lights, pass through in an orderly flow, and then continue toward their own destinations.
Perhaps that's the kind of organization we hope to build in the future:
Freedom on the road. Order at every intersection.