Broken Window

Another beautiful concept explored in The Pragmatic programmer. (For those who haven’t got the chance to read it, I am attaching screenshot of the pages with this content). The concept defined here is that imagine a building beautifully constructed in the heart of the city. Now, one day due to some natural reason one of the window breaks, and the owner thinks it in this way – “Its just a small thing why should I bother with this detail?”. One might feel that this is a very small or rather negligible thing. This attitude brings in a sense of abandonment to the onlookers and this when left unchecked slowly and onlookers and inhabitants stop caring for the building. Gradually more of such “small incidents” occur, maybe another window gets broken, maybe a crack appears on one of the doors. Slowly the building becomes inhabitable by growing issues and the amount of repair needed kills the desire of the inhabitants to fix it and slowly the building collapses.

The same example is valid in real life and in team building too. Imagine you are in a school and you r class teacher hands you over a task for the class and to do that you need a team, now you have a defined process in place for selecting the team and this process is somewhere faulty since it kills the opportunity for the rest of your team irrespective of their skills or ability. The solution to that is to improve the process of team selection by giving equal opportunity but rather if you take the shade of saying this has always been the process and I won’t change it, it is too painful etc then slowly and gradually your other classmates loose interest in the task that you and your team is involved in and it loses the purpose.

The same issue was existing in the locality I live in and to resolve that I took up the initiative of breaking the usual process. The issue was with the selection on Residents Welfare Association of the locality I lived in. Now since the process of selecting the officials for this organization was faulty, no activities were proper in the area. This denied the residents the opportunity to put forward their grievances and problems and killed the spirit of people to come together and resolve problems being faced by the society as such. This led to a lot of anti-social activities creep into the society and since the existing authority of RWA was faulty and they showed no interest of bringing people together and to fight this so even government authorities could not be of much help. It took me a while to realize this problem and as soon as I realized it my first move was to improve the process for this. I invited a meeting of all the residents of the area and conducted a meeting about this and in due course of time I along with a few other people of different age groups we formulated a committee not to replace the existing one rather to create a process for the selection of the RWA members, we conducted proper elections and finally a fresh RWA body was elected. This gave people a hope that their voices would be heard, and this motivated them to join hands with the RWA members and vice versa and as of today the locality is free of anti-social elements and is comparatively safer to live in.

The learning I took from this was that DO NOT LIVE WITH BROKEN WINDOWS. If you are designing a software and if there are any bad designs, poor code or faulty infrastructure, make amendments to it as soon as possible before the system collapses into nothing.

Happy Programming!

#teambuilding #programming #lifelesson