Positive Deviance
By Michaela
March 14, 2006Perhaps the most interesting presentation at the recent GEO meeting (see previous entry) was given by Jerry Sternin, a professor at Tufts and evangelist for a concept he calls “positive deviance” (PD).
Simply put, in any situation where most of the people have a bad outcome (war, famine, malnutrition, etc.) there are usually a few individuals who manage to remain resilient, to beat the odds. Jerry dubs these people positive deviants, meaning they have deviated from the expected norm in a positive way. His ideas are articulated succinctly in an article he wrote for Harvard Business Review in May 2005: “Your Company’s Secret Change Agents.“
What I find compelling about Sternin’s description of the PD phenomenon is its universal applicability. He used it first to develop a model for combating malnutrition in Vietnam, with such success that it is now used by the UN in 41 nations.
But it also applies to organizational life. Here is an example I have made up from a fictional nonprofit:
Suppose a nonprofit has ten separate programs, eight of which are losing money while two others are generating surpluses. Suppose further that the opportunities for different revenue streams are about the same for each of the ten programs (they all offer the same service—for example, child care).
The PD approach would engage program staff themselves in first studying intensely the more successful programs’ practices, and then presenting their findings to the entire group of program staffs. The PD model predicts that, over time, the less financially solvent programs would voluntarily adopt the financially healthier programs’ practices, closing the performance gap—all without any edicts from management.
I like it, and I am already thinking of ways this concept could be of use to our clients.
Tags: nonprofit
April 10th, 2006 at 10:06 am
I like it too. I ran across Jerry’s work for the first time 5 years ago in an article describing the vietnam experience. I walked around for a year talking about positive deviance. Then I heard him again at GEO and have been musing on how to bring his work to more Boston nonprofits and foundations. The model spans the often paradoxical worlds of strategy and grassroot community change. It just makes so much common sense.