Last week, on a lazy Sunday afternoon, I decided to reorganize the cabinet that sits besides the dining table in my home. To tell you the truth, the reorganization is only an excuse, as the cabinet only contains the old photo albums. Many have the photos of nature, family, and friends taken by my husband, while others contain professional photographs of ceremonies, weddings, engagements, birthdays, and anniversaries. Personally, I prefer the hard printouts of photographs instead of the digital versions. The older photos are in black and white, so they have faded with time. Great care is taken to select these photos, as printing them was a costly affair. In contrast, the photos in my phone gallery are haphazard collages of different moments and they are repetitive – multiple shots of the same moments.
Anyway, while ‘reorganizing’ the albums, which mostly included perusing through them nostalgically, I came across a photograph of my grandparents. Very neatly dressed in their traditional outfits, they stared solemnly at the camera, black and white. Looking at the photo, and trying to remember how they were like, I found myself thinking about their lifestyles.
The people of the older generations were very traditional. They did things in a certain way, and stuck to it. We know how much has changed in a matter of a generation, and sometimes, we find ourselves dismissing some aspects of such lives – we reject certain traditions, and rightly so, as many are rooted in superstition, while some are irrelevant to the modern age. But I also think that when we dismiss their lifestyle entirely, we throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The older generations stuck to their daily rituals. These rituals included religious affairs, such as doing pooja, fasting, and going to the temple, but it also included their everyday activities, such as morning walks, listening to the radio, and turning on the lights at a certain time in the evening or turning them off early in the night and sleeping on time. In their day-to-day lives, they were disciplined in a way that almost gave a devotional quality to their everyday activities. For example, my grandfather-in-law climbed the hill on foot, every single day. He had been doing it for as long as anyone in the family could remember. It wasn’t for a challenge, and it wasn’t in order to increase his stamina, nor was it a training exercise for more difficult treks in the future or so that he could boast among friends that he was fit. He simply did it, willingly, every day, and stuck to it. He must have walked a thousand miles on the same route. That kind of self-discipline is increasingly rare.
When we think of discipline, we often think of strict teachers or bosses, angry parents, and punishments for defiance. That is not the kind of discipline I am talking about. There are certain things that are worth doing with care, and attention. Repeating them every day is worth it. That’s what I mean: the discipline of consistency and care.
Fascinated by this thought, I began reading about discipline, and came across an interesting concept which pins it down very nicely. It’s called the ‘Broken-Window Theory’. It uses an example of a street where most windows of the houses are broken (hence the name).
Let’s say there is a street in your neighborhood, where many windows of the ground floors of houses, bungalows, and buildings are broken. Would you feel safe walking down the street at night? For the same reason that you feel unsafe, criminals feel safer committing crimes on that street. The broken windows are signs. They tell us that not many people who live on that street care about what goes on in the neighborhood. It may also indicate that there is no one living in those houses, since they haven’t replaced their broken windows. The broken windows tell us that the authorities have done nothing to fix or control the situation. The criminals may think, “it’s ok to commit bigger crimes, since the smaller crimes of throwing stones at the houses have gone unnoticed (and unfixed).”
It’s an apt metaphor that applies to all aspects of our lives, including work. In the workplace, if small lapses go unnoticed, it may lead to bigger problems. It may result in an attitude that is best formulated by the words ‘Chalta hai,’ meaning, ‘Anything goes’ or ‘It’s acceptable/tolerated.’
As an example, let’s take a branch office of a national organization. If some people who work here come late into the office, and leave a little early, it’s not a very big lapse in ethics. But if it’s left unaddressed, it gives the signal of similar to the ‘broken window’. To the latecomer, it says, ‘no one’s watching’ or ‘it’s acceptable’. The latecomer may start coming in even later than usual, or give inaccurate information about the amount of work he has done. If they are still left unnoticed and uncorrected, they might start claiming overtime while working only half a day. Looking at him, others may follow. Soon, the entire branch might start working at eleven thirty and packing their bags at three o’clock. The ones who come on time and keep the branch office running may get overburdened and quit their job. A small lapse in discipline, if uncorrected, leads to bigger lapses – the broken window theory in action.
To be creative and original, we need freedom. Freedom to do things in one’s own way is also necessary for enjoying work. If an employee is dictated how to spend every minute of their working hours, they are likely to start hating their work. Instead, if a sales manager is given the free-hand to pitch their customers in their own way, they may find new ways to improve. For me, improving every day and getting better at something you like to do is a very rewarding process. It gives me the satisfaction of trying something new, and when the result is good, it gives me joy to see my work paying off.
But at other times, the lack of structure which we mistake for freedom can become an obstacle. When we are free to do what we like, we might lose out on discipline and consistency. If an accountant re-checks her entries some times and not at others, depending on how confident she is about her work that day, her mood, and her work-load, it may lead to errors going unnoticed. Similarly, a manager who doesn’t hold the daily review meeting on some days, gives the indirect message: ‘it’s ok to skip daily activities some days, even my boss is not consistent about his responsibilities’ to his team.
These are very small habits and rituals at work. But their lapses become problematic down the road. So, the solution is very simple as well. S.R. Pophale, the founder of Electronica Group, used to call it ‘nipping in the bud’. When a weed is small, when it’s only a bud, it’s very easy to remove it. But if it grows, nipping it – or pulling it out – becomes more difficult. So, deal with the problems when they are small, so that you don’t have to face them when they are all grown up!
The importance of doing small things consistently is often undervalued by all of us. We are willing to forgo the discipline of daily rituals in favour of freedom or flexibility. Sometimes, that is the right strategy. But we need to strike the right balance. Some activities are too important to do ‘sometimes’ instead of ‘every time’, because the lapses become broken windows, inviting bigger problems.
Reading about the Broken Window Theory, I took a second look at my daily schedule, and decided to do three activities every day, no matter what, with attention and care. Just three, to begin with. A thousand mile’s journey begins with a single step!
