Positive Deviance
They went to villages in trouble and got the villagers to help them identify who among them had the best-nourished children—who among them had demonstrated what Jerry Sternin termed a “positive deviance” from the norm. The villagers then visited those mothers at home to see exactly what they were doing.
Just that was revolutionary. The villagers discovered that there were well-nourished children among them, despite the poverty, and that those children’s mothers were breaking with the locally accepted wisdom in all sorts of ways—feeding their children even when they had diarrhea; giving them several small feedings each day rather than one or two big ones; adding sweet-potato greens to the children’s rice despite its being considered a low-class food. The ideas spread and took hold. The program measured the results and posted them in the villages for all to see. In two years, malnutrition dropped sixty-five to eighty-five per cent in every village the Sternins had been to. Their program proved in fact more effective than outside experts were.
Ideas like this fascinate me: they are so simple, yet so effective. However, they are also very difficult to arrive at — life doesn’t hand them to you, as they are unusual and new. It is always easier to follow common wisdom and do what everybody else is doing. But that approach will also lead to a more complicated and less effective solution.
via Atul Gawande: University of Chicago Medical School Commencement Address
June 23, 2009 at 22:33
Agreed — often the best discoveries are right in front of us. The theory of positive deviance can and has been used in business as well. We have found that the best place to locate best practices for an organization is to talk with the organization’s positive deviants. They are the ones that have excelled where others have not. Since they have a track record of success, it seems logical to draw on their knowledge rather than rely on an outside consultant.