Positive Deviance An approach to behavioral and social change

Deep-rooted social and health challenges often seem insurmountable in communities worldwide. Positive Deviance (PD), a strategy born from a nutrition project in Vietnam, illuminates the power of outlier practices to combat such issues. Valuing local wisdom and behaviors offers a sustainable blueprint for transformative, community-driven change.

In the international development and health sectors, Positive Deviance has been used to address issues as diverse as childhood malnutrition, neonatal mortality, girl trafficking, school drop-out, female genital mutilation (FGM), MRSA infections in hospitals, and HIV/AIDS.

You can best understand Positive Deviance by the following story:

Positive Deviance was first applied by Jerry and Monique Sternin through their work with Save the Children in Vietnam in the 1990s.

At the start of the project over half of the children in the project villages were malnourished.

Through a PD inquiry, the villagers found poor parents in the community that had well-nourished children.

They went on to discover that these families were feeding their children foods that other villagers considered inappropriate; they washed their children’s hands before meals, and actively fed them three to four times a day instead of the typical two meals a day.

It was these simple “deviant behaviours” that made all the difference but instead of simply telling parents what to do differently (or creating a best practice document!), they helped the villagers design a program to act their way into a new way of thinking.

To attend a feeding session, parents were required to bring one of the newly identified foods. They brought their children and while sharing meals, learned to cook the new foods.

At the end of the two year project, malnutrition had fallen by 85%.

A fantastic outcome! Think about it: the villagers were helped to discover this for themselves. No nutritional experts were involved, and no extra resources were needed. The “solution” was sustainable.

The PD approach best suits problems requiring behavior and social change. PD is based on the following principles:

• Communities already have the solutions to their issues and are the best people to solve them.
• Communities have the people and the ability to self-organize to respond effectively to a common problem.
• Know-how is not concentrated in the leadership of a community or external experts but is distributed throughout the community.
• The PD approach enables the community to seek and discover sustainable responses to a given problem because the demonstrably successful but not widely adopted behaviors are already practiced in the community.
• It is easier to change behavior by practicing it rather than being taught about it. “It is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than think your way into a new way of acting.”

Positive Deviance has been applied in the private sector, but it has not been as successful as international development and health.

There seem to be several reasons for this, but the main one is that the Positive Deviance approach is entirely facilitative. The community identifies the problem it wishes to tackle and is fully responsible for the inquiry, solution development, and execution.

This is not how things typically work in business organizations. We are still caught up in the paradigm of telling people what to do rather than working together with them.

Positive Deviance presents a compelling model for tackling complex problems within our organizations and communities. We can unlock the existing innovative solutions by shifting to a facilitative, collaborative approach and trusting local knowledge.

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• Positive Deviance is an approach to change based on the fact that there are people who find better solutions to problems than their peers. #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement

Resources

• Website: Positive Deviance
• Book: The Power of Positive Deviance by Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin

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