The Bright Spots Audit
When teams underperform, the instinct is to diagnose problems. But deficit analysis triggers blame. A faster path: find your bright spots and replicate them.
Jerry Sternin arrived in Vietnam in 1990 with an impossible brief: reduce childhood malnutrition in six months with no additional resources. Traditional analysis would have mapped every deficit. Sternin did the opposite. He found the families whose children were well-nourished despite identical poverty and asked: what are they doing differently?
The answer was small but specific. These mothers added tiny shrimp and sweet potato greens to rice, and fed children four smaller meals instead of two large ones. Same ingredients available to everyone. Different behavior.
Within six months, malnutrition dropped 65%. Not by importing solutions, but by finding ones that already existed.
The mechanism: deficit analysis triggers defensiveness. "What's wrong?" becomes "whose fault?" Bright spots bypass this entirely. The proof is internal, so "that wouldn't work here" disappears.
The hack: Pick your lowest-performing team and your highest. Ask three questions: What does the top team do differently? What conditions surround them? Which of those conditions can be replicated? Start with the smallest replicable difference.
