One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

Blind Spot Number Three: An Overwhelming Crisis
Sometimes it’s hard to spot small problems because, paradoxically, the damage they inflict can be so
great that we assume the source of such horror must lie in deeply complicated troubles. This is true for
marriages, careers, addictions, corporations, and even for worldwide health disasters.
Many Americans are unaware that diarrhea kills a million children around the world each year. To put
this number into perspective, that’s the equivalent of a jumbo jet full of children crashing every four
hours. Global health-care experts and governmental organizations have attempted to reduce its occurrence
through large-scale, costly solutions, such as delivering improved plumbing systems to the beleaguered
areas or introducing oral rehydration therapy to the medical facilities that serve these children. These
efforts are laudable and useful, but they demonstrate a blindness to one very small problem that leads to
diarrhea: dirty hands. In the countries where fatal childhood diarrhea is most prevalent, soap is usually
present in the house, but only 15 to 20 percent of people use it before handling food or babies. When
people keep their hands clean, diarrhea cases can be reduced by more than 40 percent. It is easier to teach
a person to prevent diarrhea by washing his or her hands than it is to install new plumbing across a
continent or to supply a therapy 
after
the disease has taken hold.
A happier example can be found in New York City’s approach to crime. In the 1980s, there was a
yearly average of two thousand murders and six hundred thousand felonies. In the subway system alone,
riders and workers fell victim to fifteen thousand felonies per year. Frustrated politicians and police
officials tried again and again to reduce major crime with bold steps, raising the number of cops on the
beat, increasing budgets, and so on. They assumed that since crime had attained such outsized dimensions,
only the splashiest, most costly techniques could deflate the statistics. But, despite great expense and
effort, crime continued to rise.
Enter William Bratton, who was hired in 1990 to reduce New York’s subway crime. Bratton’s
philosophy was influenced by a lecture he’d attended on the “broken windows” theory, first postulated in
1982 by two criminologists, James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. The broken windows theory held
that if a city—or a neighborhood or a street—tolerated minor infractions of the law, it was practically
inviting more serious offenses. Wilson and Kelling observed that when kids threw rocks at a vacant
building and broke one windowpane, and that windowpane was not fixed, the remaining windows were
soon broken as well. But if the initial broken window was repaired quickly, vandals stayed away and the
rest of the windows remained intact. This scenario was emblematic, Wilson and Kelling believed, of a
larger truth about crimes: People are more willing to break the law in neighborhoods where small crimes
go unnoticed or unpunished. If no one in the neighborhood is able to handle a drunk who is loud and
disorderly, will any of the citizens even attempt to interfere with a mugging or call the police during a
robbery?
When Bratton arrived in New York in 1990, he brought this kaizenlike philosophy with him. Resisting
what must have been extraordinary pressure to apply radical, showy solutions to the problem of subway
crime—a problem that plagued millions of responsible citizens as they rode to and from work each day—
Bratton isolated small problems instead. He decided to focus on the petty crimes that eroded the quality of

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life for transit passengers but did not put them in physical danger. These crimes included urinating in
public, vagrancy, and turnstile jumping. Imagine Bratton’s bravery in telling cynical and angry New
Yorkers that he was going to focus on turnstile jumping instead of homicides. But he held to his plan.
Instead of staging massive but infrequent roundups of criminals, Bratton had his officers arrest turnstile
jumpers day in and day out and keep fifteen or twenty of them at a time handcuffed in the subway station—
where other passengers, not television crews, could see them. This had a dramatic effect not just on small
crimes but on major felonies as well. When police ran background checks on the turnstile jumpers, they
often found criminals wanted for violent offenses. And it also became clear that would-be muggers were
inhibited by the crackdown. Apparently, they weren’t willing to pay for the privilege of riding the subway
and robbing people.
One of Bratton’s district captains, Miles Ansboro, found himself solving another small problem. He
wanted passengers to notice his officers’ presence and to feel safer, but no one even looked up as his
uniformed officers walked by. So he asked himself a small kaizen question: