Page 47 - The Power to Change Anything

36 INFLUENCER

actual community, family, or organization you want to change.
Second, discover and study settings where the targeted prob-
lem should exist but doesn’t. Third, identify the unique behav-
iors of the group that succeeds.
When members of The Carter Center team began their
assault on Guinea worm disease, they used this exact method-
ology. They flew into sub-Saharan Africa and searched for vil-
lages that should have Guinea worm disease but didn’t. They
were particularly interested in studying villages that were
immediate neighbors to locations that were rife with Guinea
worm disease. Eventually the team discovered its deviant vil-
lage. It was a place where people rarely suffered from the awful
scourge despite the fact that the villagers drank from the same
water supply as a nearby highly infected village.
It didn’t take long to discover the vital behaviors. Members
of the team knew that behaviors related to the fetching and
handling of water would be particularly crucial, so they
zeroed in on those. In the worm-free village, the women
fetched water exactly as their neighbors did, but they did some-
thing different when they returned home. They took a second
water pot, covered it with their skirts, and poured the water
through their skirt into the pot, effectively straining out the
problem-causing larvae. Voilà! That was a vital behavior. The
successful villagers had invented their own eminently practi-
cal solution.
The team took copious notes about this and a handful of
other vital behaviors. By studying the successful villagers, the
team learned that water could easily be filtered without import-
ing prohibitively expensive Western solutions.
To bring this a bit closer to home, let’s briefly look at
something many people have experienced—what seems like
uncaring or insensitive medical care. In this case, a large re-
gional medical center’s service quality scores had been decreas-
ing slowly and consistently for 13 consecutive months. Clinical
quality was very good, but the scores showed that patients and