What if an organization only adopts, “don’t dwell (or deal with) what’s broken” and spends scant time on recognizing - and no time analyzing or attempting to duplicate - what is working?

How does lower-level staff - the bright spots - affect a culture shift among the dug-in, change/accountability-resistant manger/executive staff - especially in a smaller, manager-deficient organization?

When you only focus on what’s broken, you rarely develop the insights and ideas that will lead to fixing something.  It’s the exceptions of function that help us define what will address the larger dysfunction.  Also, by pointing to what works, there is common ground among staff and managers for finding answers.

In my book I wrote about Jerry Sternin from Save the Children, whom I had the honor to meet years ago when I lived in Cambodia. Sternin approached problems in a truly innovative way: Rather than focusing on what was wrong in neighboring Vietnam, he decided to look for solutions to change that already existed in communities. He called it “positive deviance,” and it had a huge role in improving childhood health in Vietnam. Instead of spending all his time focusing on the problem of undernourished children, he visited children that were not undernourished and watched closely what their mothers did differently. Then he had these women teach their solutions to other mothers. They were things like adding sweet potato greens to a lunch of rice. In their new book Switch, Dan and Chip Heath tell this story in great detail (and better than I did!), calling this approach “bright spots.”  If Sternin had focused on fixing the problem of malnutrition rather than investigating where nutrition was better, he’d never have had the same success.

This is right out of Buckingham & Coffman’s great 1999 book ‘First Break All the Rules’, a survey of great managers and their management styles. When I stray from their recommendations, I generally regret it…
I admit though that it is sometimes hard to covince the negative Nellies around you to focus on the positive, but we optimists, realists & meliorists must persevere!

I understand that my question was totally unfair for a comments thread. oops.

I’ve actually tried to quietly introduce books and even Katya’s own eblasts to managers in different ways in the, “Oh, this is something everyone is talking about right now” kinda way. In this way, however, I’m one of the negative people though while the change/accountability-resistant people are stubbornly optimistic. It sometimes feels like being driven in a car by someone who’s drunk - they’re comfortable and have the control and you know asking them to pull over could make things worse for you. That sounds awful, I know. It’s isn’t that bad, clearly.

Things were actually easier when I lived and worked on behalf of at-risk orphans in Tanzania and people were more open to saying, “Yes, this is how we do things and, yes, this is how we ‘live’, but, yes, we are also open to considering ideas and another perspective.” I guess the biggest difference is that they knew our presence was short-term (a year) whereas the current organization can allow decades to unfurl during a change process.