The Power of Positive Deviancy

Today, Americans are living in remarkable times. In a time when our threat environment is more and more unpredictable, people have the freedom to act in concert and in public for the good of the community. Most people have a fairly good understanding of the word “deviate” as someone who operates outside of the norm, sometimes in a negative antisocial way. However, on the other end of the deviate continuum are people called “positive deviants.” Positive deviants are those people in the community who, despite all odds and working with the same resources as everyone else, has already licked the problem that confounds others. These individuals are said to be positive deviants in the community because their survival behavior is also outside of the community norm of response, but for doing good. Examining, understanding and mapping of positive deviants and their social networks in the community is important. Positive deviants have the potential to be strong community influencers. Their influence and strength can be utilized as community assets to help prepare and repair the community before, during and after community challenges. These unlikely innovators can help solve some of the world’s toughest problems. When it comes to community engagement, it is essential for the community to discover noteworthy positive deviants in its midst and adapt their practices and strategies to other parts of the community.

POSITIVE DEVIANCE AND POSITIVE DEVIANTS

The term “Positive Deviance” initially appeared in nutrition research literature with the publication of a book entitled “Positive Deviance in Nutrition” by Tufts University nutrition professor, Marian Zeitlin, in the 1990s, where she compiled a dozen surveys that documented the existence of “positive deviant” children in poor communities who were better nourished than others. The essence of the meaning of positive deviance is that within every community there are certain individuals who are able to influence the behavior of others.

The basic premise of positive deviancy has three parts. First is that that solutions to seemingly intractable problems already exist. Second, the solutions have been discovered by members of the community itself and third, that these positive deviants have succeeded even though they share the same constraints and barriers as others in the community.

The secret sauce of the positive deviance process is how it engages and transforms the social dynamics that have kept things stuck.

Positive deviants are those in the community who serve as community connectors and catalysts and the community readily knows who they are. Moreover, from a positive deviance perspective, individual difference is regarded as a community asset, which is essential in discovering noteworthy variants. The study of positive deviancy was made famous by Jerry and Monique Sternin, in their application of the principle to childhood malnutrition in Vietnam. In the early 1990’s, Jerry Sternin, a visiting scholar at Tufts University, and his wife, Monique, experimented with Zeitlin’s ideas and operationalized the Positive Deviance concept as a tool to promote behavior and social change to organize various PD-centered interventions around the world. Positive Deviance was demonstrated as a social change approach, first to childhood malnutrition, and then expanded its successful application to a variety of seemingly intractable problems in diverse sectors, such as public health, education, and child protection, among others. To understand the concept of positive deviance, consider the following case study.

Case Study: Malnutrition of Children in Vietnam

In Vietnam in the early 1990’s, traditional aid supplemental feeding programs were rarely maintained after the programs ended. Jerry and Monique were asked to design an approach that would enable the community to improve and sustain the young children’s health status. Building on Marian Zeitlin’s ideas of positive deviance, working with four communities and a population of 2,000 children under the age of three, the Sternins invited the community to identify poor families who had managed to avoid malnutrition despite all odds, facing the same challenges and obstacles as their neighbors and without access to any special resources.

These families were the positive deviants. They were “positive” because they were doing things right, and “deviants” because they engaged in behaviors that most others did not. The PD families broke with Vietnamese cultural norms in two ways.

The Sternins’ discovered that caregivers in the Positive Deviance families collected tiny shrimp and crabs from paddy fields, and added those, along with sweet potato greens, to their children’s meals. These foods were accessible to everyone, but most community members believed they were inappropriate for young children. The Positive Deviance families were also feeding their children three to four times a day, rather than twice a day, which was customary.

Using the positive deviant families as guides for other in the community, activities led by the positive deviant families enabled all of the families with malnourished children to rehabilitate their children. Because the families were known and part of the community, they influenced their neighbors to practice the demonstrably successful but uncommon behaviors. The pilot project resulted in the sustained rehabilitation of several hundred malnourished children and the promotion of social change in their communities. Think of the possibilities using this simple concept in community policing, healthcare, gang behavior, crime prevention, and even disrupting the terrorist radicalization cycle.

The case study illustrates that finding positive deviants in the community falls under the category of lateral or creative thinking. Instead of asking, “why are so many starving?” the positive deviance approach asked, “who are the people in the community that are well-nourished?” The positive deviance approach makes the assumption that the positive exists and it is yet to be discovered in the community. This kind of problem-solving approach deviates from the current method of problem-solving which is for most food aid programs that focus on the top-down models. Instead, in the positive deviancy approach, the focus is on the community, its people and the social networks is — which far from linear.

An important concept here is that each community must make the very particular journey to mobilize itself, overcoming fatalism and resignation to discover the wisdom latent in the community. This bears repeating: the community must make the discovery itself. The community alone determines how change can be disseminated through the practice of new behavior — not through explanation or edict from an expert or hierarchy. In regards to individuals who are positive deviants, they function as innovators, catalysts, influencers and connectors in the community. Positive deviants have the special gift of bringing people together and their gift is not just knowing a lot of people but the ability to be a connector in the community.

A key concept of positive deviance is that it is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than to think your way into a new way of acting.

This concept turns the traditional model for social change on its head because those from the outside sent to change thinking seldom has a lasting effect. Changing behavior from the inside of the community, from neighbors identified as positive deviants has a lasting and sustaining effect. Jerry Sternin makes this point clear. He said, “You can’t bring permanent solutions in from the outside. You can’t import change. You have to find small but “deviant” practices that are already working in the organization and amplify them. Maybe, just maybe, the answer is already alive in the organization — and change comes when you find it.”