A Save the Children worker arrived in Vietnam with $50,000 and six months to solve malnutrition in an entire county. Instead of importing food or expert solutions, he looked for what was already working. He found one village where kids were healthy—they fed three smaller meals instead of two, adding weeds and tiny shrimp from the rice paddies.
He brought mothers from other villages to see the proof. The whole county changed its feeding practices. Problem solved.
The contrast is stark: hundreds of billions of dollars of imported food aid to Africa produced little lasting change. One person who looked for what was already working, with $50,000, transformed a county.
This principle applies everywhere—in teams, in personal growth, in organizations. The solution is often already present somewhere in the system. The job isn’t to invent something new but to notice what’s working and amplify it.
Related Concepts
- Gratitude reveals solutions deficit thinking hides
- See what’s right and build on it
- Discovery, not improvement
- Find what’s already working and spread it rather than fixing what’s broken
- Gratitude solves problems by seeing what’s right and growing it