Think of the toughest problems in your organization or community. What if they'd already been solved and you didn't even know it?
In The Power of Positive Deviance, the authors present a counterintuitive new approach to problem-solving. Their advice? Leverage positive deviants -- the few individuals in a group who find unique ways to look at, and overcome, seemingly insoluble difficulties. By seeing solutions where others don't, positive deviants spread and sustain needed change.
With firsthand stories of how positive deviance has alleviated some of the world's toughest problems (malnutrition in Vietnam, MRSA infections in hospitals), the authors illuminate its core practices, including:
Mobilizing communities to discover "invisible" solutions in their midst
Using innovative designs to "act" your way into a new way of thinking instead of thinking your way into a new way of acting
Confounding the organizational "immune response" seeking to sustain the status quo
Video: Positive Deviance
A collection of videos on Positive Deviance.
Positive Deviance (PD) is an approach to behavioral and social change based on the observation that in every community there are individuals or groups of people (so called Positive Deviants) whose behaviours and strategies enable them to find better solutions to problems than their peers even though they have access to the same resources and face similar challenges.
In the international development and health sectors, PD has been used to address issues as diverse as childhood malnutrition, neo-natal mortality, girl trafficking, school drop-out, female genital mutilation (FGM), MRSA infections in hospitals and HIV/AIDS.
Media Information:
You will find information on over 200 books on this website - books that relate to the themes of the site: knowledge, learning, creativity, innovation and personal development.
If you would like to receive an e-mail alert whenever I post information about a new book (i.e. one that has been published in the last 12 months) then please click on the button below and complete the form.
Discoveries from one community cannot be repackaged and provided to another as a silver bullet, That's a "best practice" rollout and it invariably evokes the immune rejection response.
The real objective isn't just "knowledge" or getting an 80--20 understanding of the situation. The overriding objective is engagement, creating a buzz, mobilizing people to take action.
Explicit knowledge, conventionally delivered like pizza (neat boxes with toppings of concepts, theories, best practices and war stories), is consumed by the brain but not metabolized into action.
The learning we call intuition, know-how and common sense gets into the blood stream through osmosis. It is shaped by social context.
Corporations, in the name of efficiency, suppress variation by "getting all the ducks in line."
To optimize productivity, they evolve highly refined and internally consistent operating systems.
Payoff - results - as long as the music lasts.
But ... all that streamlining and re-engineering limits diversity, suppresses self-organization ... and curtails a bottom up emergent response to disruptive change.
Contrary to widespread faith in "communication" and "knowledge transfer," information has a social life, and unless new insights are embedded in the social system they evaporate.
If you are interested in Knowledge Management, the
Knowledge Café
or the role of conversation in organizational life then you my be interested in this online book I am writing on
Conversational Leadership
The Gurteen Knowledge Community is a global learning community
of over 21,000 people in 160 countries across the world.
The community is for people who are committed to making a difference:
people who wish to share and learn from each other and who strive to see
the world differently, think differently and act differently.
Membership of the Gurteen Knowledge Community is free.