James Q. Wilson and George Kelling probably didn’t expect to trigger a massive policy shift of colossal socio-political consequences when they wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly in 1982 entitled Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety. The authors had developed a theory based on their observations of a well-known sequence of events in some urban communities, summarizing it like this:
“Evidence of decay (accumulated trash, broken windows, deteriorated building exteriors) remains in the neighborhood for a reasonably long period of time.
People who live and work in the area feel more vulnerable and begin to withdraw. They become less willing to intervene to maintain public order (for example, to attempt to break up groups of rowdy teens loitering on street corners) or to address physical signs of deterioration. Sensing this, teens and other possible offenders become bolder and intensify their harassment and vandalism. Residents become yet more fearful and withdraw further from community involvement and upkeep. Some people leave if they can. This atmosphere then attracts offenders from outside the area, who sense that it has become a vulnerable and less risky site for crime.”
Further to the publication, two things happened. First of all, a fuller theory emerged from what had been an observation of reality, one still too familiar in many of our cities today. Second, actions were taken in many places in the US, some of them counterintuitive, misinterpreted or controversial even now.
The glue that holds the ‘Broken Windows’ theory together, belongs to the behavioral and social sciences. I suggest that it is extremely useful - beyond the unpleasantness of some suburban life - to understand organizational decline in our safer and perhaps even cosier business organizations. As in suburban US, there are practical ways to deal with the organizational deterioration, or, alternatively, dare I say, get out before it’s too late.
The ‘Broken windows theory’ suggests that relatively small - and in themselves often harmless - realities (broken windows, graffiti on walls, litter in the streets, etc.) have the power, if not addressed promptly, of creating big social changes by sending signals to the environment. These signals are interpreted as “Nobody cares much around here, it is safe to break things, litter or vandalize, etc.”, and this makes the environment attractive to people who engage in this kind of behavior. Prolonged harmless graffiti leads to more broken windows and wider vandalism because its message is: “You can get away with destruction here”, which opens the door to broader disorder. To put it bluntly, small deterioration can create irreversible decline. The theory was a pillar for what, years later, would be known as the ‘zero tolerance’ law enforcement policy in places such as New York, which has often been misunderstood, I suspect even by many who quote the policy.
The conventional wisdom of the action to be taken to fix these problems would read: don’t let them get away with it, punish them. But in behavioral sciences terms, punishment has very moderate effects, at least if compared with what we call ‘extinction’, that is, making sure that if there are incentives for those engaged in the disorder, these incentives are removed. In behavioral sciences, we call behavioral reinforcement anything that, ‘attached’ to a given behavior, has the ability to increase the probability of that behavior. For the New York gangs engaged in massive graffiti on the underground trains, for example, the reinforcement could probably be understood in terms of a sense of power got from seeing the effects of their actions all over the place and the apparent immunity they enjoyed. Power, ego building, a sense of achievement, group spirit… Whatever it is or was, it is reinforcing those behaviors, that is, is motivating these people to do it again. While conventional wisdom and popular psychology would suggest that the police should find and punish those perpetrators, a truly behavioral sciences-based approach would favor the removal of the reward over the application of punishment. And this is precisely what authorities in places such as New York did. Instead of ‘find them and punish them’ they opted for ‘find them and show them the futility of their actions’. How? By cleaning the graffiti as fast as they could, in same cases in front of the perpetrator’s own noses. And, as a knock-on effect, overall crime declined. Big time.
‘Broken windows’ policy is far from a theoretical framework. It has clear consequences, as a commentator in the Washington Post described: “The theory has spawned a revolution in law enforcement and neighborhood activism. Broken windows? Get building owners to replace them. Graffiti on the walls? Scrub them clean, then get tough with graffiti artists. Abandoned cars? Haul them away. Drunks on the sidewalks? Get them off the streets, too”. He also cites an official American neighborhood website: “These ‘order strategies’ such as those listed below help to deter and reduce crime: quick replacement of broken windows; prompt removal of abandoned vehicles: fast clean-up of illegally dumped items, litter and spilled garbage; quick paint out of graffiti; finding (or building) better places for teens to gather than street corner: fresh paint on buildings and clean sidewalks and street gutters”. It couldn’t be more prescriptive.
We have our own versions of graffiti and litter in our companies, and I am not talking about the cleanliness of the toilets. Organizational life is full of rules of the game, some of them explicit, others tacit, some necessary, some not, some enabling us to do our jobs, some plain silly and only created to satisfy big egos. In non-judgmental behavioral terms, rules create the borders of what is or is not acceptable, therefore serving as a map for people in the organization. If the rule is stupid, people should be able to challenge it by trying to change it but never by simply ignoring it.
There is a trick here. Ignoring a stupid rule and being able to do so without being penalized, may have the intentional good consequence of making that rule less stable, which is good news. However, if an authority figure in the organization ignores the rule, period, this is a graffiti signal to others saying: rules are not taken seriously here. This may be unintended, but it is potentially a powerful trigger for widespread lack of compliance. In the process of fixing A (by ignoring it), we have created problem B. However, many rules are not stupid. They simply guide efficacy or effectiveness or time management or information flow or quality maintenance. If you see a decrease in compliance, a progressive rise of loose ends, unfinished discussions, decisions only half-baked, delayed implementations, poor usage of an information management system or agreed actions not taking place, and, people are getting away with it, you may be looking at broken windows. As in the social theory described, these facts in isolation may not be big enough to make the firm collapse, but, whether you want it or not, they will have a multiplying effect with unintended consequences.
You may think that this is simply a lack of discipline, and you may be right, but this is unfortunately just a label that means very little in behavioral terms. The reality is that if there is no negative consequence (for the perpetrators) and the behaviors are reinforced by the fact that loose compliance, for example, is simply possible, before you know it, the place will attract other non-compliance realities of a bigger magnitude. Perhaps you could also call it poor management, period. You may be right, in which case management is more unlikely to see anything particularly wrong.
I am more interested in the utility of ‘broken windows signals’ in the organization. These are symptoms that you may have spotted which, although not necessarily an expression of a true and full ‘broken windows’ environment, should be an early warning signal. They should ask you to make a judgment on whether there is something more serious behind those symptoms and signs. The greater the tendency for those loose ends, the more you should be alerted. Together with the examples given above, watch out for meeting minutes that suddenly disappear from the agenda and don’t seem to be reviewed anymore; requests for issue input followed by progressive silence; deadlines that appear more ‘flexible’ than ever or are simply not met; circulated briefing documents that nobody really reads; sudden loss of clarity about who is accountable for what, perhaps associated with an increase in so-called shared responsibility; requested formats (for meetings, reports, input sought) that are ignored; repeated postponement of events due to the lack of quorum.
All those are ‘broken windows’ in the management system. They may not kill the firm by themselves but they are symptoms of underlying pathology. In the best of these cases, there may not be death on the horizon but the firm’s weak immune system will simply attract other infections. A worse case is one when all these things seem to be ‘new’ or not noted on the organization’s previous medical history. The firm has a temperature and the fever should alert you. And alert is a good word. While very poor organizational performance may rock the firm enough to shock the system and trigger immediate remedial measures, a more gentle increased tolerance for marginal performance is a sign of serious deterioration that can easily be overlooked. It is the equivalent of walking through the same street every day and not noticing the broken windows and the graffiti.
You may think that this is all very well, but that it’s not happening or not possible in your organization. After all, yours isn’t one of those companies. For the eternal optimists, I would remind you of a social experiment in 1969 by Philip Zimbardo, now professor Emeritus of Psychology in Stanford. It is considered a precursor of ‘broken windows’ and you’ll see why. Zimbardo left two identical ‘vulnerable’ cars on the street in two different places and waited for them to be vandalized. The one left in New York’s Bronx was stripped bare in a day. The one left on the street in Palo Alto, California, remained untouched for a week. At the end of the week, Zimbardo himself put a hammer through one of the windows and, as a report put it: “As though this act and its impunity were the starting gun they were waiting for, the Californians rallied round to destroy that car just as thoroughly”. All it takes is a broken window in your organization. You decide what action to take, but here is a tip: don’t bother with punishment.
Dr Leandro Herrero practised as a psychiatrist for more than fifteen years before taking up senior management positions in several pharmaceutical companies, both in the UK and the US. He is co-founder and CEO of The Chalfont Project Ltd, an international firm of organizational consultants. Taking advantage of his behavioural sciences background - coupled with his hands-on business experience - he works with organizations of many kinds on structural and behavioural change, leadership and human collaboration. He has published several books, among which The Leader with Seven Faces and Viral Change, both published by meetingminds.
http://www.meetingminds.com - http://www.thechalfontproject.com