From our newsletter Outside the Lines

Finch inspiration

Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was inspired in part by a bird he saw on the Galapagos Islands. Darwin’s Finches have evolved from a single ancestral species into fourteen different species, each adapted to different and specific environments and foods.

Quirks and Quarks, a fascinating radio program on these finches has me musing once again on the process of change. I realise that much of the work I do could be called “accelerated evolution”, helping people and teams move towards where they were heading in a faster, more ambitious and more courageous way.

Change now comes standard with life, and we’ve all experienced times when it’s worked and times when we’ve resisted it. There are many theories of how to best spark change and how to manage it, all of which work much better on paper than they do in practice.

One process I find inspiring and useful is that of “positive deviance.” It connects how an individual’s Great Work can

influence a system that they’re in (whether that system is a team, an organization or a community).

In this month’s main article, Undercover Change, I’m looking at how people who are doing something a little odd, a little weird, a little untested – but something that works - become the seeds of change.

Undercover Change
(a version of this article was first published as Positive Deviants in April 2005)

In the 1990s, Jerry Sternin was invited by the Vietnamese government to come and battle infant malnutrition. It was a tough task made near impossible by the time frame given: six months. That meant that the traditional systemic approaches to change – fixing water supplies, sanitation, and food distribution patterns – didn’t have a chance.

Sternin’s approach was based on the observation that in every group there are a minority of people who find better and more successful solutions to the challenges at hand. These are the positive deviants, and even though they have access to exactly the same resources as the rest of the group, their uncommon practices or behaviors allow them to flourish.

A metaphor that sums up the insight behind the Positive Deviance approach is that of the human immune system. Like the immune system, individuals and institutions reject what is perceived as “foreign matter”. Strategies for change that are externally generated rather than “invented from within” fail to take hold.

The positive deviant approach builds the solution from within the system so that both the solution and the host share the same “DNA”. Those in a community or organization are helped to discover the positive deviants in their midst, understand the strategies they employ and then create among themselves a process for enrolling the larger community in the desired change.

In Vietnam, Sternin worked with four villages and had the women chart infant growth by age and weight. As part of that process, Sternin asked if there were any children who came from poor families but were nonetheless well nourished. This was the “a-ha!” moment for the Vietnamese mothers – they realized that it was possible for a poor family to have well-nourished children.

It became apparent that there were a number of differences in how the positive deviants fed their children:

First, they fed them small but regular meals (as opposed to once or twice a day). Second, they were willing to feed them greens and small crabs, food that the social norms had decreed as low-class and common, even though they were nutritious.

Sternin and his team set up a number of processes where the mothers were exposed to this different approach of feeding their children, processes where the mothers actually experienced the benefits of eating the foods (rather than just being told about them).

A Fast Company article lays out a number of key principles behind the Positive Deviant approach. Three that stood out for me were:

1. Identify conventional wisdom.
You need to know what’s “normal” (what you can do, what you can’t do) before you can understand what might deviate from it.

2. Identify and analyze the deviants.
Who’s behaving in a different way… and succeeding?

3. Let the deviants adopt deviations on their own.
This, Sternin says, is absolutely critical. It’s not about reporting on a “best practice”, instead set up ways for the news to spread from the “deviants” themselves.

When it’s down in black and white like this, it can all sound pretty obvious. So why don’t “positive deviants” thrive more often? There are a number of reasons.

First, when things need to change the focus tends to be on what’s broken. Rather than relentlessly trying to fix what’s broken, the positive deviant approach (which is closely related to the Appreciative Inquiry school of thought) looks to find what’s good and what’s working, and then seeks to amplify it.

Second, the power of strong social norms. For all the focus on our bold individuality, we still seem to be an animal that finds comfort in the herd. Charles Mackay writes “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

And a third reason to resist deviating is our societal practice to blame those that are different when things go wrong. This is a recognized phenomenon - creating a scapegoat. Its most classic form is when an outsider is brought in to “save the day”, only for the organization to turn against them and blame them when the system does not change.

SOMETHING TO PRACTICE

What’s the challenge you’re facing?

Who is tackling a similar challenge in a “deviant” way… and succeeding?

What are they doing that’s counterintuitive… but works?

What ideas can you borrow from them?

How are you “wimping out” because you’re bowing to social norms? What would the bold action be?

What would be the cost of doing something different? What’s at risk for you?