Page 49 - The Power to Change Anything

38 INFLUENCER

discovering what the successful villagers had done to avoid con-
tracting the parasite, the team also studied what the villagers
did when an occasional worm did pop up in the village. Here
team members exemplify our third search principle: Search for
recovery behaviors. People are going to make mistakes, so you
have to develop a recovery plan.
For instance, people in the healthier villages knew that they
were most vulnerable to the spread of the parasite when a worm
started to emerge from a person’s body. As was stated before,
the infected villager’s only source of relief from the excru-
ciating pain is to soak the limb in water. If the villager used
the local water supply, it would be contaminated for yet an-
other year.
The Carter Center team found that within the positive
deviant villages, the locals took two recovery steps to cut off the
disease cycle. First, villagers had to be willing to speak up when
they knew their neighbor was infected. Once villagers realized
that the worm came from unfiltered water, those who got the
worm sometimes felt ashamed to admit their error. The vital
recovery behavior, then, was that friends and neighbors had to
speak up when the Guinea worm sufferer was unwilling to do
so. Only when the community took responsibility for compli-
ance could the entire village protect itself from the failure of
a single villager. This crucial conversation triggered a response
from village volunteers that enabled the second vital behavior:
During the weeks or months it takes the worm to exit the vic-
tim’s body, villagers had to ensure that he or she went nowhere
near the water supply.
It turned out that if everyone in a village enacted these two
recovery behaviors—speaking up and keeping infected people
away from the water supply—for one full year, the worm would
be gone forever. No new larvae would enter the water, and the
Guinea worm would be extinct.
These same methods for discovering positive deviance can
be applied almost anywhere. We (the authors) used the tech-