Making Change Happen, on a Deadline

I like the concept of a 100 days goal!

Uvealblues

Like many companies in AIDS-wracked Ethiopia, PreFabricated had an AIDS policy, which included extra pay for its H.I.V. positive workers so they could buy more food.  In March, 2008, the company decided to do more.  It set a goal of persuading 70 percent of its employees — 700 people — to get tested for H.I.V. in 100 days.

This was a startling idea.  “Employees do not like to get tested at work because of privacy concerns,” said Seife Mergia, the company’s head of planning and information.  Most of the employees did not work at headquarters, but were scattered around various construction sites.  They were mostly contract day laborers — a workforce few companies invest in.  Yet by day 40 the company had built a clinic. It set up a lab and hired a technician.  It gave people credible evidence that their H.I.V. status would be confidential.  At the 120-day mark, 900 people had been tested for H.I.V.

PreFabricated surpassed its goal using a strategy called Rapid Results, in which a group of people choose a project and carry it out in 100 days.  Companies in Addis that used Rapid Results got their H.I.V. testing rates up to about 75 percent — triple the norm.   The same method has been used in Nicaragua to help pig farmers raise fatter pigs and to improve dairy farms’ milk quality.

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Rapid Results is an eccentric idea.  Nadim Matta, a management consultant who is president of the Rapid Results Institute in Stamford, Conn., likes to say that what’s missing to turn poor places into rich places isn’t more information, money, technology, workshops, programs, evaluation or any of the other things that development organizations normally provide.  What’s missing are motivation and confidence.

At first glance, this seems crazy —  can we cheerlead our way into the middle class?

What Matta means is that usually the obstacle to development is not that we don’t have the tools, but that we don’t use the tools we have. People drag their feet. The next step is someone else’s problem.  

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The deadline creates an ethos of doing whatever it takes.