Switch - Chip Heath [15]
Cade asks her what the kids might notice on good days.
MOM: I think I just look calmer.
CADE: What else?
MOM: I probably greet them more enthusiastically and smile more.
Solutions-focused therapists believe that there are exceptions to every problem and that those exceptions, once identified, can be carefully analyzed, like the game film of a sporting event. Let’s replay that scene, where things were working for you. What was happening? How did you behave? Were you smiling? Did you make eye contact? And that analysis can point directly toward a solution that is, by definition, workable. After all, it worked before.
These “exceptions” are just like Jerry Sternin’s bright spots. Just as there were some kids in the Vietnamese village who managed to stay healthy despite the poverty, there are some moments in an alcoholic’s life when he is sober despite the cravings. Those bright spots are gold to be mined. (Notice again that bright spots provide not only direction for the Rider but hope and motivation for the Elephant.)
What does this mean for you? You may not fight malnutrition, and you may not need therapy. But if you’re trying to change things, there are going to be bright spots in your field of view, and if you learn to recognize them and understand them, you will solve one of the fundamental mysteries of change: What, exactly, needs to be done differently?
Suppose you’re a human relations manager, and you’ve been encouraging line managers to give feedback to their employees more frequently, rather than storing it up for their once-a-year performance reviews. You hosted an offsite training program for ten managers so they could practice the recommended new style of in-the-moment feedback, and they all left the program pledging to experiment with it.
After four weeks, you start to hear back from some of the managers, and their results have been mixed. Two of the managers seem genuinely transformed—excited about the way the faster feedback has improved their relationships with team members. Five of the managers are weakly positive, saying they tried it a few times. Two of the managers say, regretfully, that they’ve been too busy to try. One is an outright skeptic and thinks the whole initiative is hogwash.
What now? The bright spots give you an action plan: Go investigate the two successful managers. First, see if either situation is an anomaly. For instance, in your follow-up, you might discover that one of the successful managers had not been giving any more feedback to his team—he’d simply been approaching individuals more often to make small talk. The extra social contact made him feel good but annoyed team members (who were constantly interrupted). That manager is not a real bright spot.
The other success might be legitimate. Maybe the manager, Debbie, devised a tracking sheet that reminds her to provide feedback to every employee every week. Maybe she set a goal for herself that her “quick feedback” will never last longer than two minutes and will apply only to a specific project—it won’t be a referendum on an employee’s overall performance. Maybe she set up open-door “office hours” so that employees can drop by for quick feedback on ongoing projects.
Now that you’ve defined your bright spot, you can try to clone it. Have the other managers spend an hour or two shadowing Debbie, seeing firsthand how she incorporated the new style into her workday. Get Debbie to attend your next offsite training program so she can coach other managers on the mechanics of quick feedback. Talk to IT and see if there’s a way to roll out a more polished version of Debbie’s impromptu tracking sheet.
Bottom line: You are spending 80 percent of your time exploring Debbie’s success and finding ways to replicate it. You aren’t obsessing about the manager who was skeptical. You aren’t planning another training program with the same managers to review the material. You are simply