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By Root 989 0

—called bright spots by marketing scientists Chip and Dan Heath in their book Switch—who have figured out workable solutions to specific problems. The bright-spot approach was first developed by Tufts University nutrition professor Marian Zeitlin, who noticed that a number of studies of child nutrition in impoverished communities had found that within any given community, some children seemed to be better nourished than others. After understanding these naturally occurring success stories—how the children’s mothers behaved differently, what they fed them and when—Zeitlin realized that he could help other mothers to take better care of their children simply by teaching them the homegrown solutions that already existed in their own communities. Subsequently, the bright-spot approach has been used successfully in developing nations, and even in the United States where certain hand-washing practices in a small number of hospitals are being replicated in order to help reduce bacterial infections—the leading cause of preventable hospital deaths—throughout the medical system.28

The bright-spot approach is also similar to what political scientist Charles Sabel calls bootstrapping, a philosophy that has begun to gain popularity in the world of economic development. Bootstrapping is modeled on the famous Toyota Production System, which has been embraced not only across the Japanese automotive firms but also more broadly across industries and cultures. The basic idea is that production systems should be engineered along “just in time” principles, which assure that if one part of the system fails, the whole system must stop until the problem is fixed. At first, this sounds like a bad idea (and it has led Toyota to the brink of disaster at least once), but its advantage is that it forces organizations to address problems quickly and aggressively. It also forces them to trace problems to their “root causes”—a process that frequently requires looking beyond the immediate cause of the failure to discover how flaws in one part of the system can result in failures somewhere else. And finally, it forces them to look either for existing solutions or else adapt solutions from related activities—a process known as benchmarking. Together these three practices—identifying failure points, tracing problems to root causes, and searching for solutions outside the confines of existing routines—can transform the organization itself from one that offers solutions to complex problems in a centralized managerial manner into one that searches for solutions among a broad network of collaborators.29

Like bright spots, bootstrapping focuses on concrete solutions to local problems, and seeks to extract solutions that are working from what is already happening on the ground. However, bootstrapping goes one step further, sniffing out not only what is working, but also what could work if certain impediments were removed, constraints lifted, or problems solved elsewhere in the system. A potential downside of bootstrapping is that it requires a motivated workforce with strong incentives to solve problems as they arise. So one might legitimately wonder whether the model can be translated from highly competitive industrial settings to the world of economic development or public policy. But as Sabel points out, there are now so many examples of local successes—footwear producers in the Sinos Valley of Brazil, wine growers in Mendoza, Argentina, or soccer ball manufacturers in Sialkot, Pakistan—that have flourished on the strength of the bootstrapping approach that it is hard to dismiss them as mere aberrations.30

PLANNING AND COMMON SENSE

Most important, what both bright spots and bootstrapping have in common is that they require a shift in mind-set on the part of planners. First, planners must recognize that no matter what the problem is—creating a more nutritious diet in impoverished villages, reducing infection rates in hospitals, or improving the competitiveness of local industries—chances are that somebody out there already has part of the solution and is willing