Switch - Chip Heath [10]
Whether the switch you seek is in your family, in your charity, in your organization, or in society at large, you’ll get there by making three things happen. You’ll direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and shape the Path.
DIRECT THE RIDER
2
Find the Bright Spots
1.
In 1990, Jerry Sternin was working for Save the Children, the international organization that helps children in need. He’d been asked to open a new office in Vietnam. The government had invited Save the Children into the country to fight malnutrition. But when Sternin arrived, the welcome was rather chilly. The foreign minister let him know that not everyone in the government appreciated his presence. The minister told Sternin, “You have six months to make a difference.”
Sternin was traveling with his wife and 10-year-old son. None of them spoke Vietnamese. “We were like orphans at the airport when we arrived in Vietnam,” he recalled. “We had no idea what we were going to do.” Sternin had minimal staff and meager resources.
Sternin had read as much as he could about the malnutrition problem. The conventional wisdom was that malnutrition was the result of an intertwined set of problems: Sanitation was poor. Poverty was nearly universal. Clean water was not readily available. The rural people tended to be ignorant about nutrition.
In Sternin’s judgment, all of this analysis was “TBU”—true but useless. “Millions of kids can’t wait for those issues to be addressed,” he said. If addressing malnutrition required ending poverty and purifying water and building sanitation systems, then it would never happen. Especially in six months, with almost no money to spend.
Sternin had a better idea. He traveled to rural villages and met with groups of local mothers. The mothers divided into teams and went out to weigh and measure every child in their village. They then pored over the results together.
Sternin asked them, “Did you find any very, very poor kids who are bigger and healthier than the typical child?” The women, scanning the data, nodded and said, “Có, có, có.” (Yes, yes, yes.)
Sternin said, “You mean it’s possible today in this village for a very poor family to have a well-nourished child?”
“Có, có, có.”
“Then let’s go see what they’re doing.”
Sternin’s strategy was to search the community for bright spots—successful efforts worth emulating. If some kids were healthy despite their disadvantages, that meant malnourishment was not inevitable. Furthermore, the mere existence of healthy kids provided hope for a practical, short-term solution. Sternin knew he couldn’t fix the thorny “root causes.” But if a handful of kids were staying healthy against the odds, why couldn’t every kid be healthy?
Notice that Sternin was trying to focus the mothers’ Riders. The overall topic—what can you do to make your child healthier?—is simply too big and loaded to take on at once. The mothers needed direction, not motivation. After all, every mother’s Elephant is going to be motivated to make her child healthier. But how?
Remember the power of the 1% milk campaign, which made an abstract idea (“eat healthier”) practical. Sternin was saying: Let’s not sit around analyzing “malnutrition.” Let’s go study what these bright-spot mothers are doing.
As a first step, Sternin and the mothers had to eliminate any bright spots who weren’t “typical.” For example, a boy might have an uncle in the government who could send extra food his way. Other families wouldn’t be able to replicate that.
In order to recognize what the bright-spot mothers were doing differently, the group had to synthesize the “conventional wisdom” about feeding kids. So they talked to dozens of people—mothers, fathers, older brothers and sisters, grandparents—and discovered that the community norms were pretty clear: Kids ate twice a day along with the rest of their families. They ate food that was appropriate for kids—soft, pure foods like the highest-quality rice.
Armed with an understanding of the norms, Sternin