A short summary of Positive Deviance

The most intractable problems tend to share certain properties:

1. It is not primarily technical. There is a large behavioural and social aspect to it.
2. Multiple attempts have been made to solve the problem before. The problem is resilient.
3. Someone within the situation has probably already solved the problem but neither they nor anyone else realise this.  These are positive deviants.

That's great! All we have to do is find the positive deviants, figure out what they're doing, design a change program and we're done!

Except that this does not work...

The core challenge is not so much on what to do but more on how to get people to do it.

Guiding Principles for "how to get people to do it"
The Positive Deviance approach proposes the following guiding principles:

• The community owns the entire process
• Involve everyone. "Don't do anything about me without me."
• The community itself (versus external experts) engages in Positive Deviance Inquiry (uncommon, successful behaviours and strategies) including adapting to their own circumstances
• The community itself (versus external experts) designs an action learning approach to spread discoveries to others
• The involvement of the community exposes them to social proof that "someone just like me" can get results, even in worst case scenarios.
• Emphasise practice instead of knowledge - the "how" instead of the "what" or "why" - "...knowledge doesn't advance practice. Rather, practice advances (and internalizes) knowledge."
• The community itself creates its own benchmarks and monitors progress

See The Power of Positive Deviance and the Basic Field Guide to the Positive Deviance Approach

There is also an emphasis on change by piecemeal evolution rather than big-bang re-organisation.

"The mantra of the PD process is to leave as much cultural DNA intact as possible."

Positive Deviance as a set of steps
If we look at Positive Deviance as set of steps, it's actually quite simple:

1. Define the problem and desired outcome
2. Determine common practices
3. Discover uncommon but successful behaviours and strategies through inquiry and observation
4. Design an action learning initiative based on the findings

The Remedy of Last Resort
Positive Deviance is probably not appropriate for every situation; it does require a lot of commitment, time, and effort.  Even the creators describe it as a "remedy of last resort", that is, what you do when other approaches have failed.

But I think there are interesting principles and tools that are useful here even if you don't follow the full process.  And I do like the Taoist parallels...

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 

Lao Tzu