Except this story wasn't about finding the influencers - if the healthier families were influential, there wouldn't have been much need for the outside intervention. To take your analogy, this would be more like modeling your system around the most successful practices at your implementation site as opposed to designing a system and forcing compliance.

A good point. I think you're correct in what the article's focus is and I way oversimplified what it actually does.

To take the reasoning a bit further - what the program is really doing is finding examples of the behavior they want to encourage, then turning the practitioners of that behavior into influencers.

Which is an altogether different thing than what I'd outlined. And also far trickier I'd imagine.

The article describes neither finding examples of a behavior they want to encourage, nor turning anyone into influencers.

First, they start with a desired result they want to encourage, and then seek out what behaviors are currently leading to that result.

Second, the approach to diffusing those behaviors described is not simply raising the influence of the people practicing them, and may or may not have that effect at all.

I recommend that you read the article with an eye to what it says instead of what you expected it would say before you started reading it.

Focusing on persuading influencers is an old strategy for innovation diffusion, and that's not what this article is about.