Positive Deviance: A Complement of Appreciative Inquiry

Fellow Reader Blogger, Laura Portalupi, writes that she was introduced to Appreciative Inquiry in her U.S. Peace Corps training prior to going to South Africa to work primarily in education. It’s good to know that the Peace Crops is open to using Appreciative Inquiry to do what Laura says: “to learn to value” what the culture they are working with values. Another such practice, one that is complementary to Appreciative Inquiry and in some ways more intriguing because it is counter intuitive, is that of Positive Deviance (PD). Briefly, here’s PD’s story:

In the late 1980s, Marian Zeitlin at Tufts University was researching hospitals in developing countries, trying to understand why in the groups of malnourished children being rehabilitated there were always a few children who seemed to recover faster and better than the majority. She labeled them “positive deviants.”

In the 1990s, Jerry and Monique Sternin, working on assignment in Vietnam for Save the Children and familiar with Zeitlin’s thinking, took PD one step further. At that time, nearly half of the children in Vietnam were malnourished, and yet there, too, were those few deviants who faired better than the majority. The Sternins decided to seek out the families of these positive deviants to uncover what these families did that was different from the practices of the majority. Once they uncovered what these practices were, they decided to attempt to make the behavior of the positive deviant families into model behavior, using the members of the families to be the facilitators for positive change.

It worked, and the Sternins came to call this the process of “amplifying the positive deviant.” Now, PD has been put into practice around the world in many cultures, and even in corporations, helping thousands of men, women, and children break through cultural challenges and change their lives. Here’s the definition of PD from the PD Initiative web site:

Positive deviance is a development approach that is based on the premise that solutions to community problems already exist within the community. The positive deviance approach thus differs from traditional "needs based" or problem-solving approaches in that it does not focus primarily on identification of needs and the external inputs necessary to meet those needs or solve problems. Instead it seeks to identify and optimize existing resources and solutions within the community to solve community problems. (www.positivedeviance.org)

A Bangladeshi woman from a village changed by PD told the Sternins, "We were like seeds locked up in a dark place, and now we have found the light." (From: www.fastcompany.com/magazine/41/sternin.html)