March 19, 2011 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Washington
Organizations, whether they are nonprofit or for-profit, spend a lot of time analyzing why failed projects didn’t work, but very seldom devote energy to figuring out why the successful ones do, Dan Heath, co-author of Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, told participants here at the Nonprofit Technology Conference.
Taking the time to find those “bright spots,” determine why they work, and replicating them can be a powerful strategy for change, he said.
As an example he told the story of Jerry Sternin, an official at Save the Children who tackled the problem of malnutrition among children in Vietnam in the early 1990s.
The experts said the problem was the result of multiple factors, such as poverty, the lack of access to clean water, and a poor education system. But Mr. Sternin knew that those weren’t issues that he could fix, so he looked for what he could control, said Mr. Heath.
He went to a mothers’ group in a village and asked for their help measuring and weighing all the children in the village. When they found that there were some children from very poor families who were bigger and healthier than the others, Mr. Sternin and the mothers visited those families to see what they were doing differently.
It turned out that those families were giving their children four small meals of rice a day, instead of the normal two. (The two groups were eating the same amount of rice, but the smaller servings were easier for the children’s bodies to process.) The mothers of the healthy children were also adding tiny crabs and shrimp—something that adults ate but weren’t considered appropriate for children —and sweet-potato greens, which was considered a “low-class” food.
Armed with that knowledge, Mr. Sternin helped the mothers set up cooking classes. Six months later, three-quarters of the children in the village were better nourished, Mr. Heath told conference participants.
In time, the tactics developed in that one village helped to improve the health of more than 2 million children across Vietnam.
Nonprofit technology officials can apply the same strategy to their work that Mr. Sternin used to fight malnutrition, said Mr. Heath.
“Think about the last couple of times that you had to roll out new software releases, new features, new hardware,” he said. “Probably some of them were problematic, and some of them were oddly smooth. Have you really taken the time to investigate those ones that went smoothly? What was it that you did differently in those situations? Are there things that you can learn and replicate in the future?”
