Coming Back to the Magic Phrase

A few nights ago I read a couple of chapters of Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. The authors use examples from all different sources to illustrate their ideas, and there's some of the inevitable internal phraseology that happens (they borrow Jonathan Haidt's Elephant and Rider analogy for our emotional and rational mind, respectively, and add things like Paths, bright spots, Clinics, etc.), but it's a goldmine of simple, sensical, study-backed social science that is useful in a lot of ways.

What struck me most was this:

To pursue bright spots is to ask the question, "What's working and how can we do more of it?" Sounds simple, doesn't it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: "What's broken, and how do we fix it?"

This one paragraph sums up a lot of what I talk about here: seeing children as broken and in need of repair, instead of working from their strengths. Seeing what kids aren't doing well, and drilling them on it, over and over, in various ways, instead of taking a moment to see what they are doing well and building on it.

As a prime example of this, I'll quote again, from this post, what the American Association of Pediatrics has to say about vision therapy: “Ineffective, controversial methods of treatment such as vision therapy may give parents and teachers a false sense of security that a child’s learning difficulties are being addressed, may waste family and/or school resources and may delay proper instruction or remediation.”

You see, a simple solution such as giving a child "magic glasses" to help them read in a more facile manner works - and it works while flying in the face of the heaping pile of research, statistical compilations, and endless maze of solutions that's grown up around learning difficulties. Low-power glasses don't change a child's ability to read; but they change a child's belief in his or her ability to read, and something so simple and powerful just doesn't fit in with all the carefully controlled studies. Doctors and education specialists conclude that since it doesn't fix what's broken, then the fact that it solves the problem must somehow be false.

No, no, and no!

Do you see? We come back to the magic phrase: people don't see what they're not looking for.

If you are not looking to see what works, you will not see anything that works as a solution. If you're looking for ways to fix something that's broken, you will always be focused on the broken pieces because that's where you started. If you start from success, your solution will be about building on success, rather than avoiding failure.

It's a simple, crucial difference. It's a switch we have to make.