It’s no secret that people can be very resistant to change, especially if that change comes from an external force. After all, ‘better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.’ In the business world, we often see this adage put into practice when an organization tries to improve its processes for productivity, quality assurance, cost management, etc. People like doing things the way they’ve always done them, making the task of getting your employees to accept or even embrace new processes truly daunting.
A traditional approach to initiating change within a company is to task a senior manager or even hire an outside consultant to scrutinize the existing processes, identify the problems and propose new solutions. Leveraging an outside point of view is often a logical approach because employees tend to get stuck in their own habits and can’t see the forest for the trees. However, this ‘top-down, outside-in’ approach can often lead to resentment among the workforce, resulting in a lack of cooperation that will inevitably render any proposed changes null and void.
This may sound like an odd analogy, but ‘Save the Children,’ an international organization that provides aid to impoverished children, actually faced a very similar problem in 1990 when it opened an office in Vietnam. Resentful of having a foreign organization on its soil, the Vietnamese ministry gave ‘Save the Children’ representatives Jerry and Monique Sternin only six months (and minimal staff and resources) to ‘solve’ the problem of malnutrition among millions of children. Faced with a virtually impossible task, the Sternins decided to try something no one else had before: they asked the Vietnamese people themselves how to solve the problem.
The Sternins enlisted the help of the mothers at a local village to identify children who were bigger and healthier than average and to discover what the families of these children were doing differently. Working together, they found that the parents of the healthy children were serving smaller meals more frequently and using different ingredients that had more proteins and vitamins. The Sternins and the village mothers used this knowledge to collaboratively design a program to combat malnutrition that, six months later, improved the health of 65% of that village’s children. The program eventually spread to other villages, where it has helped over 2 million Vietnamese children to date.
So why were the Sternins so successful? Because they searched for the bright spots and cloned them. The mere existence of healthy children provided a ray of hope to the village mothers, who then provided the momentum necessary to change their village’s cooking and eating habits. The Sternins’ role as ‘outside expert’ was to simply ensure that these women were able to conquer malnutrition on their own. According to Jerry Sternin, “The traditional model for social and organizational change doesn’t work. It never has. You can’t bring permanent solutions in from outside.”
This idea of modeling new process on past successes stems from a theory called ‘positive deviance,’ which examines the behavior of outliers to discover how they found a better way of doing something than others in their same situation. Although initially used as a term for sociological change, it’s clear businesses can also benefit from this ‘bottom-up, inside-out’ approach. While Agile emphasizes retrospectives, it’s important that in addition to identifying what goes wrong in a process, teams should also focus on what goes right. Find those processes that are working and duplicate them. Learn what your most productive team members are doing and have them train others. Talk to your most delighted clients and apply those lessons to others. In other words, to foster permanent change, clone your successes!
This Post was an Agile collaboration between Peter Harrison & Mayank Gupta of GlobalLogic
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