An opportunity for improvement came up recently on a coaching engagement that reminded me of the book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Chip and Dan Heath. The authors found that in a wide range of circumstances, people had approached very challenging changes in a similar way; basically, by finding the bits that were working well and using them as the basis for further improvement.
Sometimes the bits that are working well don’t look all that great at first glance. One of the stories the authors of Switch share is that of Jerry Sternin, who was charged with improving the nutrition of children in Vietnam. Rather than approaching the problem as a large-scale infrastructure problem, as had been done up to that point with poor results, Sternin went to a single village to learn how children were fed.
He noticed that some children were well nourished. Setting aside those who had Party connections, and therefore access to better food, he investigated how the well-nourished children were fed. He found their mothers mixed additional sources of nutrients into their rice, including wild plants, small shrimp and insects that could be found without cost. To a Westerner like me, mixing insects into my rice sounds rather nasty; but sometimes opportunities don’t come at you waving their arms and shouting, "Hey! I’m an opportunity!"