The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems

by Richard Tanner Pascale, Jerry Sternin, Monique Sternin

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 vivid, firsthand stories of how positive deviance has alleviated some of the world's toughest problems (malnutrition in Vietnam, staph infections in hospitals), the authors illuminate its core practices, · 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 quoInspiring and insightful, The Power of Positive Deviance unveils a potent new way to tackle the thorniest challenges in your own company and community.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Leadership, Self Help, Education, Research, Productivity

267 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 16, 2010

About the author

A leading business consultant worldwide, author and a respected lecturer / professor. In addition to being an Associate Fellow at Oxford University (United Kingdom), he also acted as a consultant to several Fortune 100 companies. Richard Pascale owes his fame to his contribution to the 7S framework when he was working at McKinsey & Company management consultancy.

Reviews

[Frank Calberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Takeaways from reading the book:

What is a positive deviant?
Page 3: A positive deviant is an exception, whose outcome deviates in a positive way from the norm - even when working with the same resources as everyone else.

What are examples of what positive deviants do?
- Page xiii: Positive deviants in healthcare install electronic healthcare records, provide easier phone and e-mail access, offer expanded hours, involve more nurses to make sure that patients don't miss mamograms and cancer follow up.
- Page 59: Rather than focusing on the 97% of women, who are circumcised in Egypt, look and learn from the 3% who are not. What enabled them to avoid circumcision?
- Page 83: When Dr Ignaz Semmelweis discovered in 1847 in Vienna that fatal infections were spread among patients by doctors who failed to wash their hands between examinations, he immediately instituted a procedure requiring physicians to wash their hands between patient visits and change into clean lab coats before examining patients. As a result, hospital mortality rates from infectious diseases declined dramatically.
- Page 146: Transparency and peer review were important during the positive deviance process at Goldman Sachs.

What can a person do to strengthen positive deviance in a community?
- Pages 47, 194 and 197: Start a positive deviance process with an invitation, in which community members can opt in or out. Involve everyone. Let people own their choice to be involved.
- Page 193: Learn from the people, plan with the people, begin with what they have, build on what they have.
- Page 125: Allow leadership to be exercised from everywhere.
- Pages 10 and 116: Put focus on what works - instead of putting focus on what is wrong.
- Pages 74 and 205: Share success stories of positive deviance.
- Pages 38, 45 and 110: One of the most powerful reinforcers of behavioral change is evidence that a newly acquired practice results in measurable improvement over the previous status. To reinforce behavioral change, measure results. It is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.
- Page 197: Go to improbable places and to unlikely people to find solutions.
- Page 199: Ask open questions such as what, how, why?
- Page 204: Connect people who have not connected before.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This documents a bottom up method for solving problems that have resisted conventional solutions. The authors make it clear that it's not a universal method, that it requires the group with the problem, to have members that already have parts of the solution and to engage everyone to examine the issues. It's a very positive method, it concentrates on what works and not the normal blame games or the word from on high, or the brain with the briefcase. This works best where authority is weak or diffused, top-down style organizations have not adopted it even when it's been wildly successful in one of their business units, so it's not going to help you with corporate issues.

Normally I steer clear of 'solutions' or 'new, improved, method' books because they are repackaged versions of previous management methods that come and go out of fashion. This book being published by Harvard Business School, the source of many bad ideas, made me wary. Somebody slipped up when they published this!

If you want to read a positive book on people solving difficult social problems along with learning some of the method (can humility and listening be taught?), read this book.

[Zeina A. Awaydate · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you work in development, passionate about making change in the world , then this book should definitely be on top of your list !

Just started working on a project based on the positive deviance approach , and so I thought of reading this book to have a clearer idea . I WAS HOOKED ! This book is more of a novel , listing stories of change makers around the world , people who never thought of themselves as so , but could solve the toughest of problems. You’ll read through the words of Monique ( which I was lucky enough to have met and worked closely with ) and her Husband Jerry , how to spark the change in communities .

[jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative but super redundant

Learning about this problem solving tactic was interesting and informative. Each case study built on the last and highlighted crucial nuances. Well worth the read despite getting wordy and redundant towards the last half

[Natalia · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my opinion, this book isn’t really about the power of positive deviants. It is about the power of talking, communicating, grass-roots approaches, bottom-up approaches. Anything really but not positive deviants. Positive deviants are used as an example and a good one no doubt. My favorite part about this book is how readable it is. How approachable and easy to process. I was putting off reading it as I was waiting for a moment in time when I need to sit down and read it with a highlighter and a notebook, expecting a text full of new terminology and complex long one-page-long sentences. Yet, I was happy to discover that this was an easy-to-follow, and pick-up after a break book, full of stories and examples, which made the message so much easier to grasp. I would very much recommend this book to development professionals, people working for international organizations. Reading this book might not revolutionize your work, but you might get a few pointers about how to organize a discussion in that team meeting, staff retreat, monthly stakeholders meeting, etc.

[Pavel Antoci · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I learned from this book was that any problem no matter how big it is can be resolved by finding the few people who already discovered the solution and implementing it at a larger scale through deviants. Instead of focusing on what’s missing or wrong, PD (Positive Deviance) highlights strengths, resilience, and innovative strategies already present within the community.
Through small-scale experiments and adjustments, solutions are tested and adapted, allowing for a flexible and iterative approach and the beauty of it is in the fact that it can be adapted to suit various problems locally, regionally or globally.

The book uses various case studies, such as addressing child malnutrition in Vietnam, to illustrate how PD can drive impactful change in diverse settings. Ultimately, The Power of Positive Deviance emphasizes that solutions to tough social challenges often lie in unexpected places and that communities have the capacity to solve their own problems.

It was definitely a good read and can recommend it to you too.

[Nurlan Mustafayev · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why “best practices” imported from different organizations, societies and states do not usually work in different settings? The book tries to tackle this question by developing a “positive deviance” approach (PD), which is essentially "incrementalism". Instead of rushing to “ready-made” solutions one needs to understand the local context and discover why & how a working practice is different from the rest. To be sustainable, an innovation/discovery should be the work of the community/org involved rather than by an expert/project leader. The book could have been shorter though.

Of note, PD is similar to Harvard’s PDIA framework and Fast Results which are the methods to deal with ‘adaptive problems’ in complex social/political systems where the nature of a problem is not known and possible solutions require behavioral changes – organizational & cultural change, democracy building, economic development, disease control, women’s rights, etc.

[Manouane Beauchamp · Rating 2 out of 5]

Livre contenant des anecdotes provenant du secteur de la santé publique sur ce que les auteurs ont nommé des déviants positifs.
Inconvénient : comment est-il possible de déterminer qu'une déviance est positive? Exemple : des ingénieurs de la NASA ont fait preuve de déviance lors de l'analyse des données en lien avec l'état des joints toriques de la navette Challenger dans les jours précédents sont décollage du 28 janvier 1986. Il s'est avéré que cette déviance a été la cause d'un terrible accident.
D'où ma question : comment déterminer qu'une déviance est positive?

[Denis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This should be required reading in MBA programs

I've learned about PD about a decade ago at one of the organizations mentioned in the book. A few enthusiasts knew of their early successes and were trying to restart the program.

PD is the change management process that must be taught at MBAs. The writing is on the wall: it may sound complex or unorthodox, but in the end it improves organization's survival and value.

[AnnaScott · Rating 5 out of 5]

The idea of positive deviance is absolutely fascinating. I loved how it flips the common approach to social change upside down, and applies to a variety of issues across the globe. It was also fascinating reading about the role of epidemiology, as I am currently taking a class on that and was able to understand it on a deeper level.

[Jae Kight · Rating 5 out of 5]

New way to look at old problems

Excellent resource for anyone wanting to make a change for the better when other systems have failed by allowing those involved to locate and learn from the positive deviant in their community.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite interesting.

[Summer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so good and so inspiring. It's the type I wanted to read all over again as soon as I was finished.

[Paul Gramling · Rating 4 out of 5]

i enjoyed this but i think this type of book can get repetitive. really cool stories and lots to think about for my career, but honestly could have been a lot shorter

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

excerpts from the book

As a problem solving process, this approach requires retraining ourselves to pay attention differently – awakening minds accustomed to overlooking outliers, and cultivating scepticism about the inevitable “that’s just the way it is.” Once this concept is grasped, attention to observable exceptions draws us naturally to the “who,” the “what,” and especially the “how.”

Positive deviance is founded on the premise that at least one person in a community, working with the same resources as everyone else, has already licked the problem that confounds others. This individual is an outlier in the statistical sense – an exception, someone whose outcome deviates in a positive way from the norm. In most cases this person does not know he or she is doing anything unusual. Yet once the unique solution is discovered and understood, it can be adopted by the wider community and transform many lives. From the PD perspective, individual difference is regarded as a community resource. Community engagement is essential to discovering noteworthy variants in their midst and adapting their practices and strategies.

The PD process is a tool for adaptive work. Unfortunately, we are drawn instinctively to the “technical” stuff – the “what” (specific practices and tools that make the individual positive deviants successful). That’s the easy part – and only 20 percent of the work. What matters far more is the “how” – the very particular journey that each community must engage in to mobilize itself, overcome resignation and fatalism, discover its latent wisdom, and put this wisdom into practice. This bears repeating: the community must make the discovery itself. It alone determines how chance can be disseminated through the practice of new behaviour – not through explanation or edict.

The positive deviance approach is not suitable for everything. As noted earlier, it is unnecessary when a technical solution (e.g. drought-resistant corn, a vaccine for smallpox) exists. But the process excels over most alternatives when addressing problems that, to repeat, (1) are enmeshed in a complex social system, (2) require social and behavioural change, and (3) entail solutions that are rife with unforeseeable or unintended consequences. It provides a fresh alternative when problems are viewed as intractable (i.e. other solutions haven’t worked). It redirects attention from “what’s wrong” to “what’s right” – observable exceptions that succeed against all odds.

The social fabric of each community has its own distinct pattern. This system holds intractable problems in place and must be unfrozen to allow new behaviors and mind-sets to evolve. The secret sauce of the PD process is how it engages and transforms the social dynamics that have kept things stuck.

Paradoxically, while the PD process achieves all this by perturbing the social system, as compared to other approaches, it has the lowest perturbation to impact ratio. That’s because it turns to solutions already proven within the system versus importing foreign solutions that arouse scepticism at best and outright sabotage at worst.

[Mart Roben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Change is never easy, but concrete problems with concrete causes (global warming for example) are manageable. But then there are problems that don’t have concrete causes or solutions (like a broken educational system). Yet experts, administrators and politicians still try to solve these issues by management; coming up with ideas and obliging the workfolk to experiment with them.

The results are most often unsatisfactory. There’s resistance, because nobody wants to be a subject to someone else’s experiment. Change needs to affect behaviours and attitudes, not just methods. “The Power of Positive Deviance” offers an alternative way. Instead of coming up with novel ideas, leaders should seek out positive outliers: people in the community, working with the same resources as everyone else, who have already solved the problem.

Then what? The next logical step would be to analyse what they’re doing, collect the ideas, create a booklet, stamp your name on it and send it to everyone else. That would also be wrong. The key bit in the positive deviance method is getting people to take ownership of the change. Community members witnessing that "someone just like me is succeeding against all odds with the same resources that are available to me" is the place to start. Leadership becomes about meeting, fostering and connecting, rather than knowing, informing and managing.

The book gives a thorough overview of the method plus engaging narratives about some of its daring applications. It is both emotional and enlightening.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I met the author of this book at the 2011 TEX Talks at Tufts University (Tufts Idea Exchange). She gave a talk and I put her book on my reading list, finally getting around to read it about a year later. The book is about a process of solving tough, seemingly intractable problems via a method called "positive deviance". If there's a widespread issue such as malnutrition in a particular country there's bound to be a small subset of people who are not malnourished despite having access to the same resources. The book is a collection of success stories for the positive deviance approach: malnutrition in Vietnam, female circumcision in Egypt, hospital acquired infections, sales for Merck in Mexico, girl soldiers in Uganda, and infant mortality in Pakistan. The approach seems to work well when everything else has been tried (top down approaches) because it's built from the bottom up and the community takes responsibility for identifying the positive deviants (doing it right) and developing methods for teaching others. I highly recommend reading it and at 200 pages with large font in simple narrative it could easily be read in a few days.

[Khyati Tiwari · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book provides an lucid intellection on the way to objectify most difficult of all situations. The examples set forth in the book may it be malnutrition or FGM or infant mortality; the common feature is the lost hope in the population which finally brings in that despair of solution which establishes community behavioral norms related to the problem to be
 addressed. Not only in the field where application of PD does miracles; the study of the book motivates a person to bring in changes in their own lives to set an example. The best part is the narration of the book, which keeps the readers engrossed and dawns in, so perfectly well. It is a must read, quoting the favourite verses from the book by Jerry Sterling, "It's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than think your way into a new way of acting."

[Jim]

http://www.positivedeviance.org/

About the work these authors are doing. Interested if this will be substantially different about positive deviance than other things I have read. Atul Gawande wrote a forward so I have high hopes.

The authors include the famous positive deviance story about their helping improve nutrition in rural Vietnam. This is well thought out and includes an explanation of how PD works, in what circumstances it is helpful and how groups would implement a PD program.

I liked their examples of Robins (territorial) vs Magpies/Crows (social) and how the social animals are more intelligent and have a richer life. Crows can even do this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGPGkn...

[Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had read about this book in another brilliant book (Switch by the Heath brothers). Completely inspiring - all the more so for the humility of the authors as they recognize that there are often forces at play that make this approach extremely challenging. I was most touched by the quote from Lao Tzu, so much so that reading it gave me goosebumps:

Learn from the people
Plan with the people
Begin with what they have
Build on what they know
Of the best leaders
When the task is accomplished
The people all remark
We have done it ourselves

If you have ever worked to try to instigate social change, this book is a must-read.

[Jurij Fedorov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting book for people who work with leadership, education or human resources. For anyone else it will probably just be an okay book.

Pro:
Some great examples of positive deviance that have been used in other books. Like the example of the starving children in Vietnam that got healthy by their parents changing their diet. This book is also easy to read and quite interesting.

Con:
At times it feels too unscientific as it does not present statistics or any studies on these things. It is a collection of examples of PD working in real life. Not a scientific proof that it works or when it works. But it is good enought for people working with big groups.

[Nati Vozian · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I have started to read this book, I was very skeptical about the Positive Deviance. During the reading, I have discovered the beauty and the uniqueness of PD approach. The stories described by the authors are illustrative proves that positive deviance is a truly and simple, yet so natural and community-based approach in improving people lives. The Positive Deviance is a powerful and efficient tool in policy making and social change. The reading of "Power of positive deviance" is not an informative reading, it is a genuine learning process, which challenges you to try it in your activity.

[Bryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this book. It's a great approach and I really liked the idea that everyone could be part of the solution. As a teacher, I really responded to everything they had to say about top-down approaches and why they tend not to work when social behaviors need to be changed. I could really see this working well to address problems in a school district and have it actually work and be a positive thing. Good read!

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very thoughtful, challenging read. The stories collected hear help me think about my own community in new ways. It builds on the idea that the answers to most of our problems are in our own hands - and very little in the hands of outside experts. It is a brilliant read that I really liked. I think it would be helpful to anyone in community hoping to see things get better. It's sound on many different levels.

[Ben Kruskal · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well written exposition about a method the authors developed and employed over many years helping communities and organizations discover priorities and and find a way to solve problems. The book consists of a wrap chapters each recounting one setting in which the authors were involved in helping a group figure out which problem they really wanted to solve and then how to do it utilizing the most positive examples already within the group.

[Fernando Hoces de la Guardia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting premise: lets understand the mechanisms behind the cases were some individuals and communities manage to successfully identify and incorporate best practices.
However, I did not like the execution of this premise. I wasn't sure if I was reading an ethnography or a collection of anecdotes. I wasn't sure how much cherry picking happen in selecting the successful cases. And personally, the narrative was never appealing enough for me to even finish the book.

[Anthony Woodward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greatly enjoyed reading this book that expands on the concept of PD that I had encountered in the book Switch. Switch referred to the Positive Deviance (PD) as Bright Spots. I also don't like the term PD, although logically accurate it just sounds weird. Too close to Deviants! Funny enough I found a PD regarding the name in the book in the book itself. On pg,164 it mentions 'Positive Exceptions', which I think conveys the meaning of the term in more plain english.

[Ann Oliveri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jerry Sternin's groundbreaking, life-saving work and methods. Truly gives you hope in the face of seemingly impossible odds. Love, love, love this man and this book captures him. Wish there was a second rating system so I could give it five hearts, not just five stars.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love this book. Makes you hopeful that the intractable problems of the world could yet be solved.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Simple solutions on identifying opportunities in problem solving. Interesting case studies to demonstrate the point but could be more succinct.