Hanoi, December 1990. Jerry and Monique Sternin arrived to open an office for Save the Children. Their assignment was childhood malnutrition in rural Vietnam, and government officials gave them six months to show results. Traditional feeding programs had been tried, but when they ended, the gains usually faded. So the Sternins asked a different question. In the poorest villages, were there families whose children were well nourished anyway? There were. Same poverty, same resources, different habits. Those families collected tiny shrimp and crabs from the rice paddies and added sweet potato greens to their children’s meals, food anyone could get but most neighbors believed wasn’t right for young children. They also fed their children smaller meals, more often. The Sternins didn’t deliver a lecture. Caregivers waded into the paddies with small nets, then cooked the new recipes together, and the emphasis was on doing, not telling. The approach became known as positive deviance, and Tufts reports it became the basis for the government’s childhood nutrition program in rural Vietnam.
Most of us walk into a problem and start explaining. We diagnose what’s broken, bring an answer in from outside, and then wonder why it fades after we leave. A team can tell right away whether we came to tell or came to look. The Sternins’ gift was not an answer. It was a question, and the willingness to go see.
So this week we shared a simple tool we call the Look for the Wins Question. We open the next problem-solving conversation with “Where is this already working, even a little?” Then three steps. First, name one person, classroom, shift, or team that’s beating the problem right now. Not the star. The one getting results with the same resources and the same hard days as everyone else. Second, go see it, and ask them to show us, not tell us. Third, let them share it with peers. Not a memo from us. A demonstration from them. The answer comes from inside the team, so nobody has to be sold on it, and it honors expertise that’s already in the building. One tip: ask that person for permission before naming them in front of peers. Some people love the spotlight. Some would rather show one colleague at a time.
Our Insights page refreshed this week with three talks that point the same direction. Susan Cain on the power of introverts, because a culture built for the loudest voices wastes the quiet strengths in the room. James Rhee on the value of kindness at work, and how treating kindness as an operating system, not soft management, helped turn around a failing company. Ricardo Semler on running a company with (almost) no rules, and how radical trust can do what rigid control rarely does. Three different doors, one idea: people do their best work when the conditions make room for it, and the wins are often with the quiet ones we haven’t asked yet.
Listening is not waiting for our turn to talk. Sometimes it means leaving the conference room and wading into the paddy. We still expect the problem to get solved. We just trust that someone close to the work has already started solving it. Try the Look for the Wins Question once this week, in the first ten minutes of the next team meeting. Look for the wins first.
Who on your team is already beating a problem we keep trying to solve, and when will we go see how they do it?
Sources
- Positive Deviance Collaborative, “The Vietnam Story: 25 Years Later”: https://positivedeviance.org/case-studies-all/2018/4/16/the-vietnam-story-25-years-later
- Tufts Journal, “Wisdom of the Outliers”: http://tuftsjournal.tufts.edu/archives/893/wisdom-of-the-outliers
- Arvind Singhal, “Uncovering innovations that are invisible in plain sight,” Kappan: https://kappanonline.org/uncovering-innovations-invisible-plain-sight-singhal/