When was the last time?

A recent set of road trips afforded me an opportunity to catch up on one of my favourite podcasts, Revisionist History by Malcolm Gladwell. In this most recent season, his latest book Revenge of the Tipping Point is featured and he uses the opportunity to revisit some of his early work from 25 years ago. I strongly recommend you check it out!?

The episode that really got me thinking was the one on Broken Windows, the policy famously implemented during the crime wave in New York in the early nineties. Gladwell was a great promoter of the theory but in this version, he ends the episode with the words “I was wrong, I’m sorry”! Why, you might ask.?

Active (some might say aggressive) policing as part of the Broken Windows philosophy was widely believed to have been one of the critical success factors in reducing the rampant crime on the streets of New York. At the risk of oversimplification, it gave the police indiscriminate “stop and frisk” powers without the need for a warrant of any sort – the idea being that if you knew there was a high likelihood of being searched, then you would be reluctant to carry anything illegal on your person. But, that changed in 2013 when a Federal Judge ruled the aggressive approach of “stop and frisk” unconstitutional. It was widely believed that crime would skyrocket out of control again, but it didn’t! In fact, since that ruling, crime statistics in New York have continued to decline!?

(Side note here: Mark Twain famously made the saying “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” popular so let’s acknowledge that the stats are multi-layered and perhaps in the eye of the beholder.)

The stats during the stop-and-frisk era revealed that only about 2 out of 100 people were actually ever caught with anything nefarious or, if you’re a glass-half-full kind of person, 98% of the people weren’t doing anything wrong! But what did those 98 people get for being law abiding (other than the harassment and possible embarrassment)? Nothing, nada, niks!

Has there ever been a time when you were pulled over by a traffic policeman and they said to you, “Thank you for driving at the speed limit, it’s a real pleasure to have you on our roads”? Most likely you would require resuscitation if that happened! The same goes?in your work place or with your kids.

Sure, you might notice the good behaviour, but do you draw attention to it in the same way you would bad behaviour? I think most of the time our reaction and thought is more like “for a change they are actually listening to me or doing what I want them to do”. We seldom articulate that.

The most commonly held belief by most in?positions of power or authority (be that law enforcement, management, parenting and similar) is that in order to get the right outcome, you should eliminate the bad behaviour. Tried and tested right? But what if we switched our thinking around, what if we went on a mission to catch people doing things right? AND I use the word “catch” intentionally!

Imagine if the act of getting caught doing the right thing resulted in some kind of reward, like if you gather enough good points on your driver’s licence, then you get a discount on your disc for the next year? People would want to do the right thing more often and would actually want to get caught doing it. That has to be a good result for all concerned (and perhaps there would be a whole lot less carnage on our roads every year too).

This idea is hardly new though, in his book “The One Minute Manager”, Ken Blanchard wrote about the importance of recognising and rewarding good performance; several other authors have done so as well. So why is it so difficult to do – are we just not wired that way or is there some degree of making yourself right, by making others wrong at play here? Is the threat of punishment or sanction truly a motivator to do the right thing, or does it just put people on edge or encourage them to not get caught?

In our business, it is all too easy to focus on how bad (or the lack of) governance can land you in hot water. Sadly, board and governance failures make headlines all too often, and I am certainly not advocating that these should be ignored and glossed over. But, what if the results of your board and director evaluations were shared in the same way – would that not encourage us as directors to consistently strive to make better decisions, to lead our businesses with greater purpose and direction knowing that we are perfectly comfortable with the transparency it would bring and to ultimately demonstrate that it is perfectly OK to do well while you are doing good?