Positive Deviance
Partnering with the gifts already present
Positive deviance (PD) is an approach to behavioral and social change based on the observation that in any community there are people whose uncommon but successful behaviors or strategies enable them to find better solutions to a problem than their peers, despite facing similar challenges and having no extra resources or knowledge than their peers. These individuals are referred to as positive deviants.
- Wikipedia
As I understand it, this approach is about recognizing uncommon behaviors that lead to positive outcomes, even through given constraints and limited resources.
Let’s look at a hypothetical example: In a small town, families have been falling sick very often. It’s the same stomach infection across the town, and it’s discovered soon that it’s from the water they’ve been drinking. One family, however, continues to drink the same water and live in the same surroundings, while being perfectly healthy. Turns out, they’ve been boiling their drinking water to keep from getting cold in the winters. The family in this case is an anomaly, and them boiling their drinking water is the unique characteristic that has kept them from falling sick.
We often talk about designing “with” and not “for,” to engage in and recognize existing potential, in order to create newer opportunities. I think positive deviance is exactly that.
Why is this an attractive approach?
It is an approach that recognizes potential opportunity for a solution within the community- making it easier to believe and faster to encourage and practice. Moreover, the community is in complete ownership of the strategy and its implementation.
What does the positive deviance approach look like in practice?
The positive deviance approach involves partnering with communities to:
- Develop case definitions
- Identify four to six people who have achieved an unexpected good outcome despite high risk
- Interview and observe these people to discover uncommon behaviors or enabling factors that could explain the good outcome
- Analyze the findings to confirm that the behaviors are uncommon and accessible to those who need to adopt them
- Design behavior change activities to encourage community adoption of the new behaviors
- Monitor implementation and evaluate the results.
(From The power of positive deviance by David R Marsh, Dirk G Schroeder, Kirk Dearden, Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin, BMJ 2004.)
What are the guiding principles of Positive Deviance?
- The community is in ownership of the whole process.
- Social proof: their discovery of existing solutions among their peers-people just like them, by people or groups whose behaviors need to change
- Use of existing and created new social networks (Both formal and informal)
- Focus on practice: Development of activities and initiatives that encourage practice of PD inquiry findings
- Collective involvement in the monitoring of the new activities to promote behavior change, and evaluation of the overall initiative to have sustainable impact on the problem.
(From positivedeviance.org/guiding-principles-and-definitions)
Why Positive Deviance?
The simplicity of this approach is what really stood out to me. Find what works, and amplify it — so different from our usual race to analyze, over-analyze and synthesize a proposition that may or may not be received well. I’m excited to be able to use it in my practice as a social designer someday.
