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

The Franklin Expedition left England in 1845 and sailed to the Arctic in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. The explorers maintained a firm commitment to the “British way of doing things,” as did most English explorers of the era. “This is how things are done,” they thought, as they wore uniforms of the finest English wool, and ate a diet consisting primarily of English beef from the newly developed “tinned” cans. However, they paid a high price for their inflexibility. Trapped in an ice floe on Hudson Bay through long Arctic winters, the crews watched their comrades die from hypothermia in the bitter cold. English wool didn’t insulate their bodies from the intense cold. In addition, many developed scurvy from a lack of Vitamin C, and dementia from the lead-based solder in the beef cans.

Oddly enough, salvation was always close at hand. The native dress of skins and furs kept the local inhabitants warm, and a diet of fresh seal and lichen tea kept them healthy. In fact, British explorers who adopted native methods tended to live a whole lot longer than their counterparts in wool. They were actually derided by their countrymen for having “gone native.”
Those “gone native” explorers illustrate perfectly, though far too late, the notion of positive deviance (PD) outlined in The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems (Harvard Business Press, 2010, $26.95). The authors draw primarily on their work with Save the Children. This non-profit group specializes in improving the lot of children around the world. They first developed their PD system while combating malnutrition in Vietnam.

While tough enough to defeat the Chinese, French, Americans and the Chinese again, Vietnam seemed powerless to combat a high mortality rate among children. It was brought about primarily by widespread malnutrition. Save the Children workers were given six-month visas that could only be renewed if they attained difficult performance targets. With no time to work through the governmental hierarchies, they decided to start at the source of the problem. They observed that some children, living under seemingly identical circumstances, fared better than their puny counterparts. Two differences emerged: the parents of healthy kids added field greens to their diet, a practice considered very “déclassé” by most of the community, and they fed them more often. Total caloric intake was pretty much the same for all of the children. The workers were then able to build a grassroots nutritional movement by enabling those “positive deviants” to tell their story. Over time, they gained community support one family at a time, establishing the nutritional changes. These practices still thrive among the Vietnamese today—as do the once-doomed children.

Emulating the Southeast Asia experience, the authors then tackled a series of seemingly impossible problems: re-integrating child soldiers in Uganda, reducing female circumcision in Egypt, and reducing the spread of infections in U.S. hospitals. Throughout, their mantra became, “The way to change a community is to not engage in community change.” PD only works by looking for the exceptions to the rule, by building on the achievements of those who succeed against the odds, and by allowing those with the problem to discover—and own—the solutions. (I can’t help but think that if B.F. Skinner were around to read this he would be smiling with self-justification.)

PD is not, as the authors readily concede, the only approach to every problem. However, it does hold lessons for us all. To focus and build on success is often far more productive than dwelling only on fixing what’s wrong. Those who would like to explore this type of thinking further need look no further than The Power of Positive Deviance to begin their quest.