CRA Inc

18 May 05 @ 11:07 am

Positive Deviance: Stop Focusing on Problems and Start Focusing on What’s Going Well

In business we’re programmed to identify gaps, shortfalls and problems, and then fix them. If you’ve ever perused survey results, you’ll recognize the tendency to focus on the “misses” and breeze over the “hits.” We see an 85 percent approval rating, and immediately begin unraveling the mystery of the 15% who are dissatisfied to win their approval in the future. While it is valid and valuable to shoot for an approval rating higher than 85%, the positive deviance concept challenges the conventional wisdom about the best way to get there. Positive deviance posits that understanding and reinforcing the hits may be more useful than deconstructing the misses.

Can we succeed in fostering change when we focus on what’s gone wrong? Often we’re unable to make change stick. Why? Change initiatives, like transplanted organs, are often rejected by the very body they were designed to save because they are foreign. An alternative: “Amplifying positive deviance,” an approach that may cause you to rethink your focus on the historical misses, gaps and deficiencies in our organizations. “Amplifying positive deviance” means finding small, successful deviant practices that work and then amplifying them for the community.

The origins of positive deviance are a fascinating case study (see extended entry), but how can we apply it to organizational problems? Barbara Waugh, Worldwide Personnel Manager at Hewlett-Packard, used the process of “amplifying positive deviants” in an effort to become the best industrial research lab in the world. Waugh conducted a worldwide employee survey and canvassed for answers to basic questions. With “800 pages of frustrations, dreams and insights” in hand she identified three primary HP challenges around programs, people and processes. She communicated the findings to leadership, got buy-in and set off with two guiding principles: get the people of HP to move the organization forward, and create lasting change through incremental progress.

Next, she identified positive deviants and cultivated over 100 small and attainable grassroots initiatives to move HP Labs in the right direction. As Waugh stated, her job is to support the positive deviants…to feed them and give them resources and visibility. She sought small wins from within rather than massive transformation and discovered local answers to existing problems. Her efforts have had lasting effects and a tremendously positive impact on HP, including the development of a knowledge-sharing model that has helped thousands of HPers share ideas.

For more information about the concept of positive deviance at Hewlett-Packard, check out this link.

Where can you find opportunities to “amplify positive deviance?” Consider situations where you’re planning to:

* Perform a survey
* Undertake a “change” effort
* Solve an existing problem
* Institute a reward or recognition program

All of these situations are alive with opportunities to find what already works in your organization; to learn from the “deviant” successes, magnify them and see that they’re shared with others. Solutions that already work are likely to keep working. You need only to support, sustain, and communicate the untapped resources inherent in your organization.

Marian Zeitlin of Tufts University originated the concept while studying why a small handful of malnourished children in developing communities (the “deviants”) rehabilitated more quickly than others. “Amplifying positive deviance” means finding small, successful deviant practices that work and then amplifying them for the community.

This idea was put to the test in Vietnam when two staff members of Save the Children, Monique and Jerry Sternin, attempted to work a small miracle. The Sternins had just 6 months to produce results in the battle against malnutrition in Vietnamese children, about half of whom were malnourished at that time. Rather than using conventional wisdom to solve this problem (by dispensing answers, solutions and sage nutritional advice based on “true but useless” best practices from some far-away land), the couple sought real solutions from within.

How? They worked side-by-side with Vietnamese women and visited villages to track the age and weight of the children. In every village, they looked for children from poor families who were well nourished, then worked with these “positive deviants” to understand the feeding practices used by their mothers. In many instances, the “deviant” moms breached conventional wisdom about how, when and what to feed a child. They then helped the “deviant” mothers teach other mothers about their survival feeding practices. The Sternins took their program to 14 villages, each time using the same strategy: “Discover local answers to the problem, and then give everyone access to the secrets.”

This evolved into a living university where people from all over the country could learn about positive deviance in action and carry the concepts back to their own villages. The program has reached 2.2 million Vietnamese people in 265 villages and the concept has been successfully applied in more than 20 other countries. The program has also positively altered the lives of community members in other meaningful, yet unanticipated ways. Quite an impact from the seemingly simple concept of leveraging existing internal successes.

For more information about (1) the concept of positive deviance, or (2) the steps which can be used toward adopting positive deviance for a change program, check out this link.

posted in category(s): Theory Points