In 1990, Jerry Sternin, the then US Country Director of Save the Children, traveled to Vietnam to fight malnutrition. The condition was at an all-time high, with one Vietnamese in three suffering from malnutrition and one in four facing starvation. [1]
Sternin traveled to rural villages and learned from conversations with local groups of mothers that, despite expert opinion at the time (“malnutrition is inevitable”), it was, in fact, possible for a child from a low-income family to be well-nourished.
Armed with this knowledge, Sternin first studied the norm for how mothers fed their children (twice a day along with the rest of their families). But then he visited the outliers—the mothers who were raising well-nourished children.
To his surprise, the differences were vast. For instance, the mothers with well-nourished children fed their kids the same amount of food as the mothers with malnourished children but served four meals instead of two. (This was to help their children process their food.) The outlier mothers were also more hands-on (literally), feeding their children by hand if necessary. The outlier mothers even supplemented their children’s meals with shrimps and crabs—a food viewed as “low class,” despite its rich source of protein.
Sternin knew that knowledge alone would not change behavior, so he oversaw a program in which fifty malnourished families would meet at a hut each day and prepare food in groups of ten. The families were required to bring shrimp, crabs, and sweet-potato greens, and the mothers were instructed to wash their hands with soap and cook the meal together.
The program, which the Vietnamese National Institute of Nutrition later applied due in part to Sternin’s work, reached 2.2 million Vietnamese people in 265 villages and saw a sustained reduction in malnutrition rates of 65–80 percent. [2]
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“Big problems are rarely solved with commensurately big solutions,” write Chip and Dan Heath in their book, Switch. “Instead, they are most often solved by a sequence of small solutions, sometimes over weeks, sometimes over decades.” [2]
Sternin could have overanalyzed the causes of malnutrition—lack of water, lack of sanitation, ignorance. But instead, he asked, “What’s working and how can we do more of it?” Sternin, in other words, looked for the bright spots.
If you’re trying to make a change at home or work, there are going to be bright spots in your vicinity, and if you can learn to recognize them and use them to your advantage, you can identify what you need to do differently and make the change that’s needed.
Footnotes
[1] How Complexity Thinking Cut Malnutrition in Vietnam by Two Thirds.
[2] Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath.
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