Switch

From Leng's email

In the book Switch: how to change things when change is hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (one of whom teaches at Stanford Business School)  they describe the idea of Bright Spot (elsewhere called Positive Deviance.) It means rather than looking at something and seeing the problems and trying to solve it, instead, looking at what is going right, and trying to replicate it. The story has been told in many places (including the book)about a particular village in Vietnam that was malnourished. The researchers realized that if they were to try to solve the problems of nutrition, they would also have to solve the problem of poverty, sanitation, and agriculture.  Too many problems to solve. So, they look at positive deviance—observing which families were actually healthy and understanding what they were doing right. In two families, they discovered that the mothers with healthy children. They were just as poor as everyone else, but their kids were not malnourished.  What were they doing differently? They were feeding their children small crabs, and insects, and weeds that other families considered non-edible. But it was this addition to the diet that allowed their children, who were equally poor and lived in the same conditions as the others, to be more healthy and better nourished. The researchers than used this kind of locally generated knowledge (=bright spots, positive deviance) and spread it to other families in the village. Malnutrition started decreasing.  Because these solutions were found from within the village, it was more readily accepted. This method of making change is now utilized in several developmental programs in the world.