The origin
In 1982, James Q. Wilson, an American political scientist and professor at UCLA and Harvard University, and George Kelling, an American criminologist and professor at Rutgers University, published a research article in the Atlantic titled Broken Windows – The Police and Neighborhood Safety.
In it, they reported their observations that disorder and crime were inextricably linked and described their research on methods to improve neighborhood safety in communities, based on work they had completed in Newark, NJ.
The premise was that if a window in a building was broken and left unrepaired, the rest of the windows in that building would soon be broken as well, for an unrepaired broken window would be perceived by some people in that community as a sign that no one cared.
Those people would then feel that breaking more windows would cost nothing, which would trigger the next break occurrence more easily. One broken windows would become many and the deterioration would progressively extend to the building, the street, the neighborhood, and the community.
Wilson and Kelling also observed that this phenomenon was independent of location, as it proved true in both nice and rundown neighborhoods.
Not about location
Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford Psychologist, had reported on an experiment testing the broken-window theory in 1969. In his test, he placed two automobiles without license plates and the hoods up in 2 separate neighborhoods, a nice one and a rundown one.
In the rundown neighborhood, the car was attacked within 10 minutes and everything of value was removed from it within 24 hours. In the nice neighborhood, nothing happened to the car for a week. Zimbardo then smashed one of the car windows and, within a few hours, the car was completely vandalized.
This proved that vandalism could happen anywhere and, again, that behavior deteriorated promptly when people perceived that no one cared.
Lessons learned
Wilson and Kelling asserted that this phenomenon also applied to neighborhoods, in a process of urban decay, from broken windows, to accumulation of litter, to unintended behaviors and crime increase.
The remedial approach was simple: By fixing the single broken window promptly, neighborhoods could break the sequence of events and prevent the predictable but unwanted deterioration of the building and its surroundings.
Even better perhaps, leveraging foot patrols to agree to rules of behavior with community members and enforce the laws would contribute to preventing new broken windows.
Although logistically limiting in terms of productivity when compared to officers in cars, the on-foot approach removed physical barriers of communications (car doors in this case) between the officers and community members, which fostered better, direct communication between the parties.
The business perspective
The Broken Window Theory is about how neighborhoods, communities, community members – not unlike employees in a corporation – respond to consequential and manageable stimuli.
We contend that the concept applies to businesses as well.
Organizations that address signs of poor behavior or performance early are rewarded while those that don’t are punished.
The Theory essentially tells us that neglected and disorderly environments foster further neglect and disorder in a vicious circle: neglect signals lead to unwanted behaviors, which lead to deteriorating environments, which lead to more neglect signals, etc.
In business organizations, an unwanted employee or management behavior is a broken window. A neglected, dysfunctional process is a broken window. A violation of company guidelines is a broken window. So is a poor customer experience. Or a subpar work environment. And, many more.
All these broken windows foster environments where lax governance becomes the norm, where employees perceive that “no one cares”, where the next, predictably larger violation would “cost nothing”, thus making it significantly more likely to happen.
When employees feel that no one cares, they leave or their performance declines. And when that happens, the customers’ experience follows, customer defections increase, and the company’s brand and results are impacted.
As in the social experiment, remediation in business will also benefit from direct communication, without barriers – overly formal settings instead of car doors in this case – between managers and employees or customers, for it will provide similar benefit of better, more timely actionable insights.
Finally, as experienced in Wilson and Kelling’s research, preventing, or alternatively catching, these broken windows early and swiftly remediating to those situations will significantly improve employees’ behavior and company performance.