Senior Project Blog Post 3

This week in "Switch" I read about finding bright spots.  Heath uses the work of Jerry Sternin, an employee of Save the Children, an organization working to help children in need.  His job was to create a new office in Vietnam to fight malnutrition, but when he arrived he was told he only had 6 months to make a difference, as the foreign minister told him his presence was not appreciated by everyone in the government.  He knew about the issues that caused the rampant malnutrition: Poor sanitation, not enough clean water, and little education about proper nutrition, but all of that was "TBU" (true but useless).  With a short time span and a minuscule budget there was no way he could address these issues effectively, so he decided to take a different approach.  He went to rural villages and met with groups of mothers who would measure and weigh each child in the village and analyze the results.  They were looking for examples of kids from poor families who were well nourished.  If some kids could remain healthy despite immense poverty, then their success could be replicated and create a practical (but short term) solution.  The mothers needed direction, not motivation because all of them wanted to make their children healthier, the question was how.  This is similar to the goals of my own project.  All coaches want to make their teams and players better, but they do not know how. I want my skill development chart and data to be the "direction" these coaches are looking for even if they don't know it yet.  The solution Sternin found was that the mothers of the healthy children were feeding their kids 4 smaller meal a day (rather than 2 with the same amount of food), as their stomachs could not handle such large amounts at a time.  They also were including improvisations in the meals such as crabs and sweet-potato greens which were often seen as lower-class or improper.  These few bright spots led to a 65% decrease in malnourishment in the 6 months while Sternin was there.  I hope my tool, most likely over the course of 3 or 4 years, will help coaches develop more personalized approaches to their kids on a short term scale, while also helping the organization develop long term solutions to problems the tool will make clear.

Senior Project Blog Post 2

This week in Switch, the author focuses on the Institute of Healthcare Improvement.  IHI is a Boston based company who has revolutionized how hospitals and other healthcare providers improve the quality of their services.  After years of analyzing data they found that the “defect: rate in health care was 1 in 10 meaning that 10% of patients were not being cared for in the right way.  In 2004 they set a goal to save 100,000 people from avoidable deaths.  To do so, they had to understand the steps it takes to keep people healthy, and pinpoint the times when their coverage goes wrong.  In order to develop a way to fix the issues, hospitals, who are very hesitant to admit that they erred, needed to change decades of habits and customary practices.  Eighteen months later, however, hospitals who had enrolled in IHI’s 100,000 lives campaign prevented an estimated 122,300 deaths.  One of the main reasons for its success, according the Heath Brothers, was the fact that before it started, IHI CEO Donald Berwick set June 14, 2006 as the date he wanted to save 100,000 lives by.  This specific and measurable goal with a due date gave hospitals and healthcare providers something finite to work to accomplish.  Instead of “We want to save lives in the next few years” he made sure people remained focus on the task at hand.  He also made it easy for hospitals to embrace change.  He created an elaborate system of forms and instructions, training, support groups, and mentors, all of whom worked together. organized and efficient,  in order to complete the campaign.  I hope to be able to make the path easy for coaches to adopt a more data driven analysis and tracking of their players development by giving them all the tools they need in order to make the transition easy.  The difficult part will be showing them a finite goal they should have in mind while coaching.

Senior Project Blog Post 1

Switch by Chris Heath and Dan Heath is a book about change.  It is difficult to get people to adopt new habits because our hearts and minds rarely can reach an agreement.  Switch talks about a study done by psychologists in Chicago in 2000.  Moviegoers going to see Mel Gibson's Payback were given free buckets of purposefully stale popcorn in order to study their eating behavior.  They were given different sized buckets, each far too big to finish completely, but when they measured the amount of gross popcorn each group had eaten, those with the larger buckets ate 53% more than those with the smaller buckets.  It seems like an unimportant conclusion but the data shows there is an issue with the way we address issues and try to solve them.  Public health experts would say that those who ate too much need to be motivated to eat better.  That is a difficult, and often even impossible task.  Habits are often subconscious behaviors, thus educating someone on the benefits on better eating won't have much of an effect.  It ends up being an easy solution.  All you have to do is change the bucket size.  The study's data clearly showed bucket size as the number one determining factor in snacking size.  This pertains to entrepreneurs and my project because business is a largely psychological profession.  The product you create must make fulfill a consumer's desire or solve a consumer's problem.  For example an entrepreneur trying to help people eat healthy would be more successful at solving the problem if they created a product that helped limit people's serving sizes than if they tried to educate people on the dangers of large portion sizes.  The book describes this situation as a situational problem masked as a people problem.  It will be difficult for me to convince old-time coaches to believe in a system of charting player development data and reading about child athlete psychology (a people problem), so if I can figure out a way to alter the situation and create an environment in which they have "smaller buckets," I think that will be the key to a successful endeavor.