In the 1990’s a team from Save the Children trying to battle malnutrition in rural communities in Vietnam pioneered a novel idea. Rather than focusing on what was going wrong and trying to fix it, they tried to identify what was going right, and then promoted it.
In many villages there were examples of “positive deviance” from the norm of malnutrition; families who despite everything were raising healthier children than their neighbours. So the team explored what was leading to those families to those better outcomes, and constructed a program so that others could learn from those successes in a very practical and real way, bottom up from the community rather than the classic approach of top down from an (often patriarchal-type) expert.
So the team in Save the Children created a process to achieve that, that is radically inclusive and bottom up. The consultant plays a critical role in guiding and orchestrating the process…without them it wouldn’t happen…but their role is not to provide and implement a solution, their role is to facilitate that change coming from within.
Peter Block describes this project and the process in detail in his excellent “Flawless Consulting”. Here is my simplified version:
A willing invitation to change is accepted - so that the process is owned by the group
The group is guided to define the problem for themselves, along with a quantitative baseline
Examples of positive deviance are found, and investigated to find the existing strategies that drive it
The group then decides what strategies to adopt through hands on learning and doing
Performance is measured, and the process is repeated elsewhere to scale up success
In any restless, high growth business there is an understandable tendency to be ruthless in identifying and removing what isn’t working. We run SWOTs, we spin up new initiatives, and when we consult with clients we run the classic process of diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription. This is of course essential activity, and there are many failed companies who didn’t grasp the nettle and deal with issues that prevented their growth or long term viability. Personal and professional growth often comes from a willingness to change.
“What got you here, won’t get you there” Marshall Goldsmith
But I love the potential power of positive deviance as a way of driving organisational change in a way that is bottom up, with the solution originating from and being owned by the individuals most intimately affected. Top down change or outside in change of the type we are so often attempting in consulting engagements of course has value, but getting individuals to accept what comes from elsewhere is hard, getting them to accept what came from themselves is a very powerful alternative.