Ithuta JV

Source - Article by Bob Andrew

Positive Deviance is a social behavioural phenomenon, where certain members of a community(the so-called ‘positive deviants’) are able to solve problems that other members of the community cannot. They do this on their own and without special resources or knowledge, although they face the same challenges and obstacles as their peers.

First used to reduce malnutrition in Vietnam in the 1990s, the application of positive deviance to bring about social change, relies on the knowledge and wisdom of ‘outliers’ in the community who are managing to do better than the rest of the community. Instead of imposing solutions from without, social workers, who recognise the importance of positive deviance, facilitate the acceptance by the whole community of the behaviours and strategies of the positive deviants. Instead of throwing money at a community problem or devising grand solutions, positive deviance urges the whole community to look more closely at what some of their members are already doing and to encourage them to accept the practices of the deviants. In this way, the social workers acknowledge that the communities already have the knowledge and all they need to do is to transform the positive deviants’ knowledge into collective knowledge.

In their pioneering book on positive deviance (The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems), authors Richard Pascal and Jerry and Monique Sternin demonstrate the positive deviance requires the letting-go of traditional ideas about authority and power and, instead, allowing people to discover answers for themselves through their actions.

The concept of positive deviance in managing change can be extremely valuable in project management. Project leadership will be encouraged to be inquiry-based, problem solving will flow from solution identification, successful processes and procedures will be open to self-replication and the project management team will be asset-based and learning driven. Rather than starting with prescribed definitions and practices, attention can shift to fertile new grounds and minds that are opened to reveal new possibilities. The old adage ‘seeing is believing’ has special potency and examples of solutions that have worked in similar circumstances must be discovered and communicated.

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Positive deviance will work best for projects where there are no off-the-shelf solutions, with isolated and concealed strategies having to be discovered. Positive exceptions to the rules, being practiced by a few isolated and unrecognised groups operating with the same constraints and resources as everybody else, need to be acknowledged. The people affected need to identify the problem as well as the benefits they will gain if they solve the problem. These people need to be allowed to develop and use their own data to make the problem concrete and to quantify solutions. In this way, successful solutions are spread from the inside outwards through finding and amplifying existing solutions.