One of the leadership concepts aligned with Appreciative Inquiry, commented on an earlier post, is the concept of Positive Deviance. The name Positive Deviance is curiously associated with the statistical nomenclature and represents the statistical group that performs outside the curve and delivers unexpected results in the experimental conditions.
This concept is widely known by the work of Jerry and Monique Sternin developed several years, after the Vietnam War. In that occasion, they achieved an extraordinary result in reducing malnourished children with a feasible local solution. It is interesting to note that their working conditions were profoundly challenging. They had few resources, no qualified staff, a very short time for delivery of results and a language barrier to deal with. They were Americans in a non-English speaking community. Despite all these difficulties, they found an extraordinary solution by observing the community itself, identifying how some families with the same lack of resources, nurtured their children who did not grow malnourished.
How often we encounter problems in organizations or our communities and we need a different approach. In many cases, numerous strategies have been tried without success. In this context, I see the idea of Positive Deviance as a transformational possibility.
It is the idea of pursuing a local solution, built genuinely by the people in the organization, the community of collaborators. It consists of the search for positive experiences of individuals who can overcome the challenging conditions of the same environment that needs change and impact.
Positive Deviance brings a perspective of developing a more positive culture where engagement is a natural consequence since the solution comes from the group itself, inside the organization.
The beauty of this concept is that it proposes a collective approach, where managers are the facilitators of the processes, responsible for encouraging their teams to find the solution with their own data and their own experiences.
For reflection, I finish the post with the quote from Jane Lewis * “Positive Deviance itself is a powerful way to exploit the social capital and informal knowledge of organizations, which enables a rich vein of creativity, innovation and existing solutions to be mined for organizational and individual benefit.”
Dear Reader, if you know examples in your community or workplace about local solutions with transformational outcomes, share with us!!
* Lewis, Jane “Positive deviance. A case study in finding and harnessing the wisdom of organizational communities “Business Information Review Copyright © The Author (s), 2009, Vol 26 (4): 282-287 [DOI: 10.1177 / 0266382109349643]
It’s hard to think about a more fortunate coincidence between the leadership and the statistical meaning of Positive Defiance.
A team who is guided by somoene with the ability to look inside its own resources is more prone to find cleverer and faster answers. Like in poetry, to defy some established procedures it is really important for you to comprehend them extremely well.
It might sound reasonable to look for new ideas in a new environment, or in new people. And sometimes this could be the path to rupture. But ideas grow as fast as seeds. And when we think about the concept of Appreciative Inquiry, we may be thinking in looking to the inside to be, indeed, thinking outside the box. And with property!
Sometimes terrific ideas might arise from conditions that are imposed. But I think that to go over and beyond, we may achieve terrific results without constraining conditions. We may keep ourselves aiming to that right corner of the deviance curve.