I’ve been reading Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. It’s well-researched, well-written, and thought-provoking, and I highly recommend it.

One of the brothers’ recommendations is to pursue the bright spots in your organization. In an interview in McKinsey Quarterly (March 2010), Chip Heath says, “The principle of bright spots is that you shouldn’t try to be more like Apple; you should try to be more like yourself at your best moments.” As the Heaths write in their book, figure out “what’s working and how can we do more of it.”

The Baldrige Criteria address this by asking how you manage organizational knowledge to accomplish the rapid identification, sharing, and implementation of best practices. To many organizations, identifying best practices means benchmarking. Chip Heath is not a big fan of benchmarking. In the interview, he says, “If you believe that organizations differ in their cultures, capabilities, and structures, there’s something fundamentally odd about saying that you want to be more like another company that has a very different culture, structure, and set of capabilities.”

While most formal benchmarking processes try to address these differences, a lot of time can be wasted trying to fit someone else’s best practice to the way your organization operates. Your own bright spots should be easier to replicate because you already know they work in your culture and structure. The Heaths offer suggestions on how to recognize and understand your bright spots in their book.

Part of the problem is that we seek problems. They note that a psychologist analyzed 558 emotion words in the English language and 62% were negative versus 38% that were positive. “Bad is stronger than good,” they write. Faced with good and bad news, we fixate on the bad. Our child brings hope an A, four Bs, and an F and our first reaction is to focus on the F.

But the A is the bright spot, and if we can make the most of the child’s strengths rather than hammering away at the weaknesses, we can build on those strengths.

The same thinking applies to organizational change: We have a problem focus when we need a solution focus. “If you are a manager,” the brothers write, “ask yourself: ‘What is the ratio of the time I spend solving problems to the time I spend scaling successes?’”

To learn more about the philosophy and research behind successful organizational change, read Switch by Chip and Dan Heath.

To learn more about how Baldrige can help your organization change, click on these articles:

• Making Change Happen
• Developing Agility on 3 Fronts
• Backdoor Access to World-Class Performance
• Making Your Organization Adaptable

(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

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