by Dan Heath and Chip Heath
In 1999, the development organization WaterAid funded the construction of latrines in some villages in northern Bangladesh. In these villages, many people lacked toilets and defecated outdoors, a practice which leads to the mass spread of diseases such as cholera, hookworm, roundworm, and schistosomiasis. WaterAid’s leaders invited an outside expert named Dr. Kamal Kar to conduct an evaluation of the work. He traveled to the site in Bangladesh. That’s where our story begins. [Warning to readers: The first story ahead makes frequent use of the “s-word” for feces. If you prefer to avoid it, you might be happier to abandon the excerpt.]
In Bangladesh, Kar found that the project had gone exactly as planned. The latrines were well-built and many people used them. But he also found something else: “I would walk behind the villages and go into the fields, and in every village we went in, I stepped on shit,” he said. Open defecation was still rampant.
It was an eye-opening moment for him. The world’s development organizations had been thinking about open defecation as a hardware problem: If we just distribute enough latrines, we will solve the problem. But it wasn’t that simple. For some villagers, the latrines seemed like a solution to a problem that they hadn’t asked to be solved. Sometimes the latrines would be disassembled, with their parts used for other purposes. In one village in Malawi, no one used their fancy latrines at all. Umelu Chiluzi, a development worker, said, “If you ask them, why are you not using that latrine? They would tell you, ‘Are you sure I should put shit in that structure . . . that is even better than my house?’”
Adding latrines would not solve open defecation, Kar realized. First he would have to spark the villagers’ desire to change their habits.
Acting on this insight, he developed a methodology called Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), which has since been used in more than 60 countries around the world. But don’t let the boring acronym fool you: This is a shocking process. Here’s a stylized description of a typical intervention:
A CLTS facilitator arrives in a village and introduces himself. “I’m studying the sanitation profiles of different villages in the area,” he says. “Mind if I look around and ask some questions?” Once he has hung around long enough to attract a small crowd, he conducts a “transect walk,” leading the crowd from one side of the village to the other.
“Where do people shit?” he asks, and the villagers direct him to the common defecation areas. They are embarrassed, eager to move on, but he lingers. He points: “Whose shit is this?” He asks them, “Did anyone shit here today?” A few hands go up.
The stench is overpowering. People cover their noses with their clothes. The facilitator keeps asking questions: “Why is this shit yellow? Why is this one brown?”
The group completes the transect walk and stops in a large public space. The crowd has grown larger, curious about what’s happening. The facilitator asks them to draw a rough map of the village in the dirt. Quickly, the villagers map out the boundaries of the village, along with important landmarks—a school, a church, a stream. Then the facilitator asks them to use stones or leaves to mark where their individual homes are.
Once the map has been filled in, he points to a bag of yellow chalk he has brought and asks them to sprinkle some on the places where people shit. He says, “Where there’s more shit, use more chalk.” There is nervous laughter. The kids enjoy sprinkling the chalk on the open defecation areas.
Now the facilitator asks, “Where do you shit in an emergency—say if there’s a rainstorm, or if you have diarrhea?” More laughter as new heaps of yellow chalk are scattered around. Often it circles people’s homes—in those emergency situations, people can’t make it to the common areas.
It is hard to miss: At this point, the entire village is covered in yellow.
There is a turbulent energy in the crowd: anxious, disgusted, angry, and embarrassed. They aren’t sure what it all means.
The facilitator asks for a glass of water.
Someone provides the water, and he asks a woman if she would feel comfortable drinking it, and she says yes. He asks others and they agree.
He pulls a hair from his head. “What’s in my hand?” A hair. “Can you see it clearly?” No, not really. He walks over to a pile of shit near the meeting area and dips his hair into it. He plunges the dirty hair into the glass of water and swirls it around.
He hands the glass to a villager and asks him to take a drink. The man refuses. He passes it along, but they all refuse. “Why do you refuse?” Because it has shit in it!
The facilitator looks puzzled. He asks, “How many legs does a fly have?” Six. “Right, and they’re all serrated. Do you think flies pick up more or less shit than my hair?” More.
“Do you ever see flies on your food?” Yes. “Then do you throw out the food?” No. “Then what are you eating?”
The tension is unbearable now. This is what Kamal Kar calls the “ignition moment.” The truth is inescapable: They have been eating each other’s shit.
Often at this point, the discussion spirals out of the facilitator’s control. People are agitated. They start challenging each other: We can’t continue this! This is madness! How can we stop this?
They often ask the facilitator what they should do. But he declines to answer. “You know your village better than I do. You’re free to choose anything you want, including continuing to defecate in public.” But the villagers are determined now. It feels intolerable to live with the status quo another day.
CLTS is brutal, and it is effective. Thousands of communities worldwide have declared themselves open-defecation-free (ODF) as a result of the intervention, and in Bangladesh, where CLTS became a cornerstone of national sanitation work, the rate of open defecation has declined from 34% to 1%.
What’s odd about this success is that CLTS doesn’t really introduce any “news.” In that Bangladeshi village, people in the village defecated in public every day. They saw their neighbors doing the same. Why did the villagers need CLTS to realize something that was right in front of them?
Kar said that villagers will often tell him, “This is a truth which nobody wanted to discuss. We’re always pushing it under the carpet—and then it was brought out in public and into the daylight. … Now there’s no way out. The naked truth is out.”
They didn’t really “see” the truth until they were made to trip over it.
To trip over the truth is to endure an emotional wallop. When you have a sudden realization, one that you didn’t see coming, and one that you know viscerally is right, you’ve tripped over the truth. It’s a defining moment that in an instant can change the way you see the world.
How do we get people to trip over the truth in more ordinary organizational situations? Consider the way Scott Guthrie handled a situation at Microsoft in 2011. He’d been tapped by Steve Ballmer to lead the company’s fast-growing cloud computing service, called Azure. Guthrie visited Azure customers, and their feedback about their experience with the service was clear: Azure’s underlying technology was good, but it was hard to use. Guthrie knew Azure would never meet its growth expectations until it was much more customer-friendly. But how could he get his colleagues to understand, viscerally, how far off-track they were?
He called an off-site meeting with his senior managers and software architects, and he gave them a challenge: Build an app using Azure, just as one of their customers might. It wasn’t supposed to be a difficult challenge. But the team struggled. Some execs couldn’t use certain features; others couldn’t even figure out how to sign up. Guthrie told Fortune’s Andrew Nusca, “It was a complete disaster.” Chastened, the executives resolved to fix the problems they’d encountered. By the end of their second day, they had produced a plan to rebuild Azure completely.
The Microsoft story and the CLTS story come from radically different domains, yet they share a lot in common. First, the leader knows what truth he wants to share. Guthrie’s truth: Our customers can’t use our product. Kar’s: These villagers are making themselves sick. Second, the realization strikes fast. It takes minutes or hours, not weeks or months. Tripping happens quickly.
Finally, people in the audience discover the truth for themselves. In turn, that discovery makes the need for action obvious. Guthrie doesn’t share his findings from his customer meetings; he creates a situation where they can replicate his discovery. It becomes their own insight, and as a result, they’re motivated to act. Similarly, CLTS facilitators see the problem vividly, but they don’t share their concerns directly. They let the villagers see for themselves. The “aha!” moment should always happen in the minds of the audience.
This three-part recipe—a (1) clear insight (2) compressed in time and (3) discovered by the audience itself—provides a blueprint for us when we want people to confront uncomfortable truths. Need to convince the boss to invest more in network security? Draft her to help you design a (fake) spoofing attack and watch as dozens of your colleagues fall for it. Want to convince a school principal that his school’s classes need more participation and interaction? Have him shadow a student for a day. That way he discovers the need.
In Bangladesh, it would have been so easy for CLTS facilitators to lecture the villagers, to show them facts and data about sanitation practices. But it’s so much more powerful when the crystallizing insight happens inside them.
Sometimes, in life, we can’t get our bearings until we trip over the truth.
Dan Heath and Chip Heath are the authors of The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact, from which this article is adapted.
