Find The Bright Spot: Copy What’s Working

Heya, this is the Behavioural Unicorn, we bring you the second-best feeling in the world (the first is when put your hand out of a car window and do that dolphin wave, ahhh)

In the 1990’s millions of children in Vietnam were malnourished

Jerry Sternin who worked for Save The Children was asked to help

Children were malnourished for many reasons:

• Sanitation was poor

• Almost everyone was in poverty

• Clean water was hard to find

• Few people knew about nutrition

Jerry knew he couldn’t wait for these problems to be solved, he had to find another option.

Jerry visited a small village where he worked with local mothers. Together they asked this important question: Are there children who are healthy even though they are poor?

The answer was yes.

So they asked another question: What are they doing differently?

Turns out these families were feeding their kids differently than kids who were malnourished

• They ate the 4 means instead of 2 (they ate the same amount of food, just spread out)

• They ate tiny shrimp and crabs collected from the rice paddies (usually people thought this was for adults so most kids didn’t eat them).

• They also ate sweet potatoes (considered a low-class food)

So they wanted to see if they could teach these habits to other families

So the community created a cooking circle.

Malnourished families were put into groups of 10 where they would cook together. This way mothers would pass their knowledge on to others.

This worked beautifully

• 6 months later 65% of the kids were better nourished

• This programme was scaled up and reached 2.2 million people in Vietnam

Why did this work so well?

They focused on the bright spots, they asked what was working and how can we do more of it.

Usually, we think about what’s wrong not what’s right

Sometimes focusing on the problems can stop us from seeing the solution

Here are some examples for ya:

• Grades: Your child brings home their report card, you ask why did you get an F in English? not why did you get an A in Geography?

• Writing: We ask, why was April such a rubbish month for writing? Not why was February so darn good and how do I get more months like that?

• Sales: If some salespeople are better than others, what are they doing and can we teach others those skills?

Key Idea:

Look for the bring spot. Ask what’s working and can we replicate it?

Source

This idea comes from the delightful Switch by Chip & Dan Heath

Cheers,

J