Find the Bright Spots

Find the Bright Spots is a change method for locating places where the desired result already occurs under current conditions, identifying the behaviours that enable it and helping others reproduce those behaviours.

When to use it

• When root-cause analysis produces a long list of problems but little movement.
• When people are sceptical of a solution imported from elsewhere.
• When some individuals, teams or moments already outperform the local norm.
• When the change needs a concrete starting behaviour rather than a broad aspiration.

Origins

Chip and Dan Heath present “find the bright spots” in Switch as part of directing the rational side of change. The method is closely related to positive deviance, which studies unusually successful members of a community who face the same constraints as their peers, and to solution-focused practice, which examines exceptions to a problem. Its central premise is that an existing local success can reveal both a feasible solution and credible evidence that change is possible.

What it is

A bright spot is a positive exception: a person, team, case or period that achieves more of the desired outcome without privileged conditions that make comparison meaningless. The method changes the question from “What causes all of this failure?” to “Where is the problem absent or less severe, and what is happening differently there?”

The unit of learning is behaviour, not personality. A useful bright spot yields a practice that other people can observe, try and adapt with comparable resources. The example is evidence for a hypothesis, not proof that one behaviour caused the result.