Focus on the Winners

Another thing I learned from the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, by Chip and Dan Heath, is that, when you want to make big changes in a large organization and do this when you are NOT the boss, then it helps to focus on whoever is winning.  Who is getting the best results?  What are they doing differently?  I might not be an expert and I might not have any authority to dictate anything.  But if I can identify the people who are getting the best results, and I can figure out how they are doing this, I gain knowledge that can transform the rest of the organization.

The authors tell a powerful story to illustrate their point.  In 1990, Jerry Sternin was working for Save the Children and was sent to Vietnam to improve childhood nutrition in poor rural villages.  The Vietnamese government told him they were not thrilled to have him there and gave him six months to "make a difference", but offered no support.  He had almost no money or staff.  It was a classic case of trying to make a huge impact on a large number of people with no authority, staffing, or resources.

So what did Sternin do?  He focused on the winners.  Which families in these poor villages managed to have healthy, well-nourished children?  He collected data on children's weight and size and other indications of nutritional health to identify those families that were somehow keeping their kids healthy despite having the same burdens of poverty and sanitation that the other villagers faced.  What were they doing differently?

Eventually, working with the mothers in these families, he discovered subtle differences in the foods they gave their children.  These were foods available to all the families living in these conditions and doing this type of farming.  But the families of the healthier children had them eat things like sweet potato greens and shrimp and crabs from rice paddies.  These foods were available to all the families at this level of income, but only the families with healthy children were eating them.

Sternin was not a nutritional expert, he had no government support, he had little money or staff, but his discovery of what was DIFFERENT about the successful families caused nutrition to measurably improve in 65% of the families at the first Vietnamese village he worked with.  Eventually, the program delivered measurable gains in nutritional health for 2.2 million Vietnamese people in 265 villages.  Not because Sternin was an expert or could tell people what to do.  Only because he recognized, championed, and reapplied the best practices that other people were already doing.

In the case of my recent projects, the stakes are nothing compared to what Sternin was dealing with.  I'm just dealing with some ordinary business needs at a company.  But I found my "winners" in a part of the business that I know little about, an area where I have no authority or track record.  But I'm finding that the more I focus on understanding what these "winners" are doing and telling others why their methods seem to be working, the more I'm able to influence large numbers of people to be open to change.