The year is 1990 Jerry Sternin and his wife Monique and their little 10 year old son, Sam have just landed at Hanoi Airport. The Sternins have been sent by the Save the Children organization at the behest of the Vietnam Government to help with a huge issue of child malnutrition. After the first night stay at the government guest house the next morning the couple go to meet the Foreign Affairs Minister. The minister tells them, “Listen we do have a huge problem but not all my colleagues are very happy to have an American here. So you have just six months to not only find the issue but also reverse the problem and make it a sustainable solution.” Jerry knew that conventional wisdom would say that the problem with malnourishment was because of an intertwined issue of three things which are poor sanitation, no clean drinking water, and poverty. Now with just one couple and a few staff there was no way he would be able to save these people from either poverty or change the entire sanitation system or even bring in clean water. Jerry Sternin interestingly had said in an interview was that these are TBUs or True But Useless information. They decided to hit the ground so they visited four villages or in Vietnam called communes where they decided to weigh every child below the age of three. They weighed 2,000 of them and they found that over 68% of them were actually malnourished and half of them under the huge risk of dying. When the list was prepared, he asked the staff to see whether there was any child in that list who was not malnourished, who was healthy but belonged to a very poor family. People looked at that list and they found some, and it was true for all villages. So, Jerry and his wife decided to visit these families which were poor but had healthy children. Initially of course the families were shy about saying what they do differently but finally they opened up. Jerry and his wife found out that they did three things differently – one, is that while like others they were feeding the rice soup to their children because that’s the only thing everyone there could afford, they were feeding it four times a day instead of twice like the other families. Second, the mothers were going into the rice paddy fields and scrimping around for little shrimps and little crabs and foraging in the forest for sweet potato leaves and they were putting that in the broth and boiling it. Third, instead of allowing other people or the children to serve themselves, the mothers in these houses actually serve the children themselves by ladling to the bottom of the pot so that they could get those shrimps and crabs. These were the three differences. Jerry and his wife realised that this is replicable. It was what Jerry called bright spots. Initially, of course the organizers they said, “Let’s take a loudspeaker and tell everyone”, but Jerry knew this is not going to work, so he decided to hold workshops that would be run by the poor mothers with healthy children for the other mothers with unhealthy children. They would cook once every day and everyone together with their children would have a meal. There was a catch here, the mothers that would come to attend would have to go to the rice paddies, scrounge around and forage for little shrimps and crabs and go to the forests and get some sweet potato leaves and come with that. That was the entry requirement for the workshop. Then they cooked together and ate one extra meal. Within twelve days there was a perceptible change in all those children and they started slowly and slowly growing healthier. Within three months 40% of the children were moved from the malnourished list to the nourished list. Slowly the team decided to expand this to other villages and again Jerry said no to replicate with the shrimps and potato leaves. Rather he asked them to find out what other healthy practices do poor families with healthy children have. In some villages it was peanuts or dried fish and that was then replicated. What they were really trying to do was to find pockets of brilliance or bright spots within the environment, like within the organization, and bring it to everywhere else. This was extremely successful! It was rolled out across Vietnam and over a million children over the next few years benefited. Post that across 40 countries have adapted this process of looking at intractable problems. What a revolutionising story! Business Points ( Tags ) #brightspots #brilliancepockets #vietnam #malnutrition
