There's a principle - originally from urban planning, later adopted in criminology - that says if you leave a broken window unrepaired, it sends a signal. That signal says nobody is paying attention. And when nobody is paying attention, things deteriorate faster than you'd ever expect.
I came across this idea long before I ever thought about building software. But it stuck with me - not because of its applications to cities or policing, but because of what it meant for organisations.
Unaddressed friction compounds. Small frustrations that go unacknowledged become resentments. Resentments become disengagement. Disengagement becomes the kind of culture where good people quietly stop trying.
So in my first business, we decided to do something about it.
The monthly ritual
We introduced a monthly meeting we called "Broken Windows." The format was deliberately simple: gather as a team, blank whiteboard behind us, and ask one question.
What's getting in the way?
Everything was fair game. Nothing too small, nothing off limits. The bins were always full. There wasn't enough quiet space for calls. Estimating project work felt like guesswork. We needed to review customer support calls more regularly. We wrote it all up.
Then we voted. Everyone picked their own top five. The scores stacked up and gave us a natural impact ranking - the things that mattered most to the most people. We'd take the top five, find a volunteer Champion for each one, and go away to actually fix them.
A month later, we'd come back. Update on the top five. Wipe the board clean. And start again.
- Raise anything - no filter, no judgement
- Vote to surface what matters most
- Assign a Champion to own it
- Come back next month and account for it
- Wipe the board. Start again.
It sounds almost embarrassingly simple. But the effect was significant.
People felt heard - not because we were running an engagement survey, but because raising something actually led to something changing. Champions felt real ownership. The team developed a shared language around improvement. And over time, the culture shifted. People stopped waiting to be asked. They started speaking up because they'd seen that speaking up worked.
From whiteboard to platform
When I started thinking about what would eventually become Trickle, I kept returning to this process. The manual version worked - but it had real limits.
A monthly meeting means a month of quiet frustration before anything surfaces. The loudest voices in a room don't always represent the most important issues. And once the meeting is over, there's no record of what was raised, who owned it, or what actually happened next.
Trickle started as a single question: what if this process was always on?
What if staff could raise issues the moment they noticed them - not wait until next month? What if the impact score emerged organically from the whole team, not just who happened to be in a room? What if every issue always had a Champion, and you could see at a glance who was responsible and what progress looked like?
The platform that followed isn't a survey tool or a feedback inbox. It's a structured system for collective improvement - built around the same core idea that made those monthly meetings work.
Fix what matters most, together, now.
Why it still matters
I've worked with many organisations since where the broken windows are obvious to everyone except the people who could fix them. Staff know. Middle managers often know. But without a mechanism to surface, prioritise, and act on those issues - visibly and accountably - the windows stay broken.
What we built with Trickle, and what we continue to develop today through our focused Sprint model, is that mechanism. Simple to start, low commitment to try, and designed around how change actually happens in organisations: not top-down, not from an annual survey, but from the people doing the work, every day.
The whiteboard gets wiped clean every month. But the culture you build from paying attention? That compounds too.
Trickle is available as a focused Sprint programme. If you're curious about how it works - and what a four-week Sprint looks like in practice - we'd love to talk.
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