We first heard Dan Heath speak at the Fast Company Awards in 2008. That year Acumen Fund was nominated for the Social Capitalist Awards, and Dan was talking about his new and (at the time) relatively unknown book Made to Stick, co-authored with his brother Chip. His words and ideas resonated deeply with us and everyone in the room, and so it came as little surprise when Made to Stick went on to become a bestseller, earning its place as a classic in its genre. We’ve been huge fans ever since, eagerly anticipating each new issue of Fast Company for the brilliant column by the Heath Brothers, and returning time and time again to the wisdom and unforgettable stories from Made to Stick and their latest bestselling book Switch .

Recently, Dan and Jacqueline decided it would be fun to swap short Q&As. Three questions each. You can read the three questions posed by Dan to Jacqueline on the Heath Brothers website here. Below are the three questions posed by Jacqueline to Dan.

What are your thoughts on how Dan and Chip’s’ principles apply to Acumen’s work?

JN: You talk about finding the “bright spots” (identifying the things that seem to be working) as one of the first steps on the road to change.  I imagine that finding these bright spots and interpreting them is sometimes harder than it looks.  For the best organizations you’ve seen, how much is this an analytical versus an intuitive process?

DH: Let me give a bit of backstory on “bright spots” for those who haven’t read Switch. Psychology tells us that we’re wired to look at the negative. When we want change, we tend to obsess about all the problems we’re having and we try to come up with solutions for them. But, in times of change, there may be many things that aren’t working, so that “problem focus” is a recipe for paralysis. Instead, we need to find the bright spots—that is, the early signs that things are working. Once we’ve found the bright spots, we can clone them. For instance, say you’ve got a troubled relationship with your teenager. Rather than obsessing about the difficulties, ask yourself, when was the last time the two of you had a really healthy interaction? That’s your bright spot. What was different about that moment? (Were you talking at a different time of day? Different place? Different conversation topics?) If you can figure out what conditions made your bright spots possible, you can reproduce them.

The same is true for social enterprise. Jerry and Monique Sternin made a career out of solving seemingly intractable problems—child malnutrition in Vietnam, sex trafficking in Indonesia, gang violence in New Jersey—by focusing on the practices that were already working, and then scaling those successes. (Interested readers should check out the Sternins’ essential new book, The Power of Positive Deviance.)

Sometimes you can use data to find bright spots. The Sternins, in particular, made data-gathering a priority. But other times, it’s not possible—it would be difficult, for instance, to collect data on your relationship with your teenager. Whether your process is analytical or intuitive, the important thing is to direct your attention to the things that are already working, in spite of the problems. (For a longer treatment of this issue, here’s an excerpt from Switch about bright spots.)

JN: One of our biggest questions at Acumen Fund is how to switch the thinking in aid from one of giving handouts to creating a mindset of the dignity and capability of every person on earth – no matter what their income.  What might we do better to catalyze that new way of thinking?  What are the things we can do and say to make people resolve to effect changes in ways that matter, ways that, well, stick?

DH: Here’s the problem: I think many of us think of “The Poor” as this homogenous, pitiable group. We imagine them as if cast by Sally Struthers, lying on the side of the road, begging for their next meal, swatting flies away from their faces. What I loved about your book—and also another eye-opening new book, Portfolios of the Poor—is that we get a more 3-D portrait of the poor. We meet people making a dollar or two a day who create strict household budgets, who save money in multiple ways, who take loans from banks and loan out money to neighbors. People with rich, complicated lives. People who are happy. (Do we need people to be miserable to be deserving of our help?)

The poor don’t need our pity, they need our business and our investment and our ideas. They need to be treated as moral equals. I’m actually very optimistic that this message—your message—will stick. One “trait” of an idea that helps it succeed is unexpectedness, and I think there’s plenty that’s unexpected in your message. Many of us have had such a one-dimensional view of the poor for so long that the reality of their experience—and the reality of their needs—will surprise and motivate many people.

JN: We spent so much time – and our educational institutions drill in the notion – working on the Rider (the analytical). At Acumen Fund we talk a lot about “moral imagination” which is the power to see things from another’s perspective and literally to walk a mile in others’ shoes.  How do we all get better at tapping into our Elephants (our emotional selves)?  More specifically, how can we teach others to do this?

DH: When we change, it’s almost always because of a feeling. There’s a spark of emotion—desire or fear or hope—that motivates us to move. We rarely learn our way into change, encountering a set of facts so convincing that we leave our past behaviors behind. Feeling comes first.

John Kotter says that change tends to happen in a three-step pattern: People SEE something that makes them FEEL something that leads them to CHANGE. SEE-FEEL-CHANGE. Here’s what I would challenge Acumen and its brethren to do: Make it possible for us to walk a mile in the shoes of the poor. Not for fundraising purposes or for heartstring-plucking purposes, but for the purpose of “moral imagination,” as you say.

I don’t know what form that could take—audio interviews a la StoryCorps? Videos that show a “day in the life?” Daily journals posted online? Regardless of the format, I think your goal is 100% right: I believe that if we can create empathy for the poor, as they really are—full of dignity and talent and promise but hampered by a shocking lack of opportunities, relative to our own lives—then we can’t help but do something to help them.