View the new Data-Powered Positive Deviance (DPPD) website: https://www.datapoweredpd.org
The DPPD team has completely revamped their online platform to provide an enhanced user experience and better serve their partners.
The website features all method-related resources, DPPD news and features, briefs of past and ongoing projects, why and how to apply the DPPD method and much more.
For those eager to use or curious to explore the many faces of the powerful and transformative Positive Deviance approach, you will find that the following new case studies and publications contain the many ways and sectors this approach has been applied.
Collective Wisdom on Positive Deviance: Learning Handbook Through 36 Q&A and Cases
By Positive Deviance Japan
The PD Japan network was formed in 2011 out of enthusiasm for learning Positive Deviance. Since then, they have been organizing monthly meetings, asking questions to one another to better understand key concepts and find out effective approaches to utilizing PD.
This book is a collection of such questions that have kept coming back to PD Japan and thus are expected to be useful for novices and veterans of PD thinking and practice alike. It is for all practitioners and researchers at different levels of expertise and will surely guide them through their respective PD journeys.
By R. Cohen, A. Gesser-Edelsburg, A. Singhal, S. Benenson & A. E. Moses
By M. Schwartz, K. M. Smits, J. Smith, T. J. Phelan & O. Restrepo
By A. S. Rafanomezantsoa, C. Coral, N. Randrianarison, C. Kubitza, D. Randriamampionona, H. Andriamaniraka, S. Sieber, S. Tojo-Mandaharisoa & J. Steinke
Twice a year, the PD team releases a free email newsletter with the most up-to-date news, publications, and events from around the world for the PD community. Facilitators and case studies from a variety of fields are featured.
Our newsletter is created for both experienced practitioners and new followers of the PD initiative to showcase different ways of implementing PD in local communities and encourage discussion within the PD community.
Sign up for our bi-annual PD newsletters simply by scrolling to the bottom of any page of the PD website and entering your name and email address in the “Newsletter” section.
The Climate Crisis manifests itself in many ways, most noticeable in the Global South. As new effects emerge all over the world, there is increasing attention to moving from mitigation to adaptation. There is widespread recognition that communities, as well as societies will need to take action to become more resilient.
Enter the potentials of Positive Deviance. What can a PD mindset and a PD approach offer to help communities organize to build conditions for increasing resilience, against problems not yet fully understood, with specific actions often lacking resources or even the will to take them?
One of the chronic questions about Positive Deviance methodology and practice is whether solutions once discovered, which create better outcomes, will work as circumstances change. And more complicating, will a Positive Deviance philosophy be able to inform and guide innovations for complex adaptive problems, like those embedded in climate change?
In the northeastern U.S., on the coast of Maine, 140 small communities, some on islands, are anticipating significant sea-level rise in the next twenty to thirty years. Additionally, the water temperatures in the Gulf of Maine are rising exceedingly fast, imperiling the current lobster fishery. Ocean acidification also threatens the cultivation and harvesting of shellfish.
Coastal communities are highly dependent on the sea to maintain their livelihoods, and their independent cultures. Community leaders and ‘ordinary’ citizens feel increasingly threatened by a future they can only dimly predict, knowing they may need to take actions with which they may not agree, and may not support.
A group of Maine-based NGO’s with considerable scientific expertise and a history of trust with communities on the coast are beginning to address their roles in helping to mobilize community actions to build resilience. In addition to considering what ‘already works’ and institutions which build social capital, these groups are looking for ideas and technical assistance to create plans to build community resilience. This resilience is yet to be defined, but is intended to go beyond physical infrastructure to address rising waters and warmer temperatures. And the resilience will need to be rooted in community values, standards, and practices.
Positive Deviance, in theory and practice, in evolution, may offer value. Any comments, ideas, or suggestions would be most welcome.
For more information or to submit ideas, please email Mark Munger.
For those eager to use or curious to explore the many faces of the powerful and transformative Positive Deviance approach, you will find that the following new case studies and publications contain the many ways and sectors this approach has been applied.
By Data Powered Positive Deviance (DPPD) Initiative
On November 25, 2021, the Data Powered Positive Deviance (DPPD) initiative launched the DPPD handbook. It provides step-by-step guide to applying the DPPD method — a mixed methods approach that relies on a combination of traditional and non-traditional data for identifying grassroots solutions to complex development problems.
By Arvind Singhal, Monique Sternin, Shafique Muhammad, Lucía Durá
In this article, the key tenets and principles of the PD approach are detailed, demonstrating how communication and social change practitioners can use PD’s step-by-step method to identify and amplify problem-solving wisdom. Three applications of the PD approach are investigated: (1) combating malnutrition in Vietnam, (2) reducing school dropouts in Argentina, and (3) decreasing neo-natal and maternal mortality in Pakistan. The conclusion: PD is an inside-out and upside-down approach to communication and social change that values ordinary, uncommon, and actionable wisdom that can make an extraordinary difference.
By Eleanor Tate Shonkoff, Sara Folta, Theodore Fitopoulos
A systematic review of the use of positive deviance approaches in primary care
By Roisin O’Malley, Paul O’Connor, Caoimhe Madden, Sinéad Lydon
By Yibeltal Siraneh, Mirkuzie Woldie, Zewdie Birhanu
By Anat Gesser-Edelsburg, Ricky Cohen, Adva Mir Halavi and Mina Zemach
Positive deviance, ecologies of innovation and entrepreneurial networking
By Samuel Ssekajja Mayanja, Joseph Mapeera Ntayi, John C. Munene, James R.K. Kagaari, Waswa Balunywa, Laura Orobia
By Arvind Singhal, Do Kyun David Kim
The Search for People Who Never Get COVID
By Smriti Mallapaty
Unstandard Deviation: The Untapped Value of Positive Deviance for Reducing Inequalities
By Kai Ruggeri, Tomas Folke
Twice a year, the PD team releases a free email newsletter with the most up-to-date news, publications, and events from around the world for the PD community. Facilitators and case studies from a variety of fields are featured.
Our newsletter is created for both experienced practitioners and new followers of the PD initiative to showcase different ways of implementing PD in local communities and encourage discussion within the PD community.
Sign up for our bi-annual PD newsletters simply by scrolling to the bottom of any page of the PD website and entering your name and email address in the “Newsletter” section.
In 2020, the UN Women and UNDP Kyrgyz country offices and their local partners Roza Otunbayeva Initiative (ROI) and the Community Development Alliance (CDA) kickstarted and spearheaded a series of social innovation initiatives and experiments to explore how the Positive Deviance Approach and the Adaptive Leadership model could solve migration challenges, improve gender equality in families and women’s political participation.
In addition to programmatic use of the PD approach, the goal was to explore how the new national ten-year gender equality strategy could be informed by regional and local successful practices in those domains. The experiences so-far are very interesting and the stories appealing.
Take this opportunity to watch and listen to the fireside chat that we organized with our Kyrgyz colleagues, and positive deviance practitioners and facilitators: Maha Abusamra, Mark Munger, and Monique Sternin.
For those eager to use or curious to explore the many faces of the powerful and transformative Positive Deviance approach, you will find that the following new case studies and publications contain the many ways and sectors this approach has been applied.
Watch how PD Israel uses the Positive Deviance approach and edutainment to address child abuse in Bedouin society.
Researchers use the Positive Deviance approach to try to find out which conditions and circumstances in life stories of young people from marginalized Roma communities (MRC) are supportive and lead to success in formal education.
By: Khadijah Breathett, Lindsay N Kohler, Charles B Eaton, Nora Franceschini, Lorena Garcia, Liviu Klein, Lisa W Martin, Heather M Ochs-Balcom, Aladdin H Shadyab, Crystal W Cené
Nations around the world are struggling with their response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In particular, they seek guidance on what works best in terms of preventive measures, treatments, and public health, economic and other policies. Can we use the novel approach of data-powered positive deviance to improve the guidance being offered?
Using Narrative Evidence to Convey Health Information on Social Media: The Case of COVID-19
By: Anat Gesser-Edelsburg
During disease outbreaks or pandemics, policymakers must convey information to the public for informative purposes (e.g., morbidity or mortality rates). They must also motivate the public to cooperate with the guidelines, specifically by changing its usual behavior. Policymakers have traditionally adopted a didactic and formalistic stance by conveying dry and statistics-based health information to the public. They have not yet considered the alternative of providing health information in the form of narrative evidence, using stories that address both cognitive and emotional aspects. The aim of this viewpoint paper is to introduce policymakers to the advantages of using narrative evidence during a disease outbreak or pandemic such as COVID-19. Throughout human history, authorities have tended to employ apocalyptic narratives during disease outbreaks or pandemics. This viewpoint paper proposes an alternative coping narrative that includes the following components: segmentation, barrier reduction, role models, empathy and support, strengthening self/community-efficacy and coping tools, preventing stigmatization of at-risk populations, and communicating uncertainty.
By: Pavlos Delias
The building permits process is a process that commonly within Europe is a municipal responsibility. It is a rather complex process because it comprises hundreds of activities, in a great variety of sequences. In 2015, five Dutch municipalities opened their data for the Business Process Intelligence Challenge (BPIC), hoping to get evidence-based insights about their process. One important issue concerns the outsourcing of some of the activities. This work tries to support this critical outsourcing decision. Following the positive deviance paradigm that suggests that positive deviant cases could act as best practices, we apply process analytics to check two hypotheses: If process flows differ within the categories (positive, normal) of cases, and if flow differences can actually recommend which activities should be outsourced. Initial results suggest that our methodology can provide valuable decision support, yet current work is limited to performance-wise elements.
By: Zelalem Tafese, Anchamo Anato
In Ethiopia, open defecation is a wide spread practice and this practice facilitates the transmission of infections. The main purpose of this study is to test the application of the Positive deviance (PD) approach on solving open defecation practice of the community. The approach uses solutions that already exist in the community to bring about sustainable behavioral and social change.
Tamotsu Ito, a PD facilitator and a business consultant in Japan, conducted an online lecture session for the Innovators’ Program’s “I-Club” at Osaka University. It focused on the Positive Deviance approach as the strategy for diffusion of innovation. About 40 students, soon-to-be innovators in the future, attended this lecture session.
Positive Deviance Facilitator Tamotsu Ito has recently released two new books in Japanese about the PD approach.
FLIP focuses on Positive Deviance, Liberating Structures and Entertainment Education in organization development. Released on January 19, 2021.
Facilitator's Tool Box discusses Liberating Structures in organization development. Released on October 13, 2020.
Ito is an organizer of the Positive Deviance Japan Network as well as a Master Black Belt of Six-Sigma with over 7 years of experience with the PD approach. His areas of expertise include the private sector and welfare for people living with dementia.
If you would like to watch the celebration and learn about ways to stay connected with those from the event, please see the event recap below.
During the event, we launched two new videos explaining the Positive Deviance approach and its global impact:
If you would like to make a donation for the funding of these videos, please visit our GoFundMe.
Thank you for the planning committee of this 30th PD anniversary virtual celebration! it is so insightful and beautiful to connect with PD global community.
PD for me represents HOPE in Action, thank you to the organizers and moderators.
…thank you to everyone who gave so generously your ideas, experiences and energy!
Thank you all for this amazing opportunity to reconnect with colleagues and friends and meet new PD practitioners and enthusiasts!
Onward to more!
Thank you everyone for a wonderful session. Truly ecstatic to connect with all PD enthusiasts.
Great event and look forward to connecting again and continuing the conversation, action and impact!
To receive notification of future events and news on Positive Deviance, please sign up for our newsletters at the bottom of our website.
In celebration of 30 years of Positive Deviance, we have launched a social media series to showcase a variety of short stories on Positive Deviance.
Follow us on our social media pages below to enjoy these stories and receive the latest news from the Positive Deviance Collaborative!
Jerry Sternin (1938-2008) is regarded as the founder of the Positive Deviance approach. An international development practitioner, Jerry served the Peace Corps for eight years in the Philippines, Nepal, Mauritania and Rwanda, and 16 years as a Save the Children Director in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Egypt, Philippines, and Myanmar. Thanks to Jerry’s passion for this behavior and social change approach and his exceptional communication and training skills, the PD approach has been applied in over 60 countries around the world.
Richard was instrumental in negotiating the funding of the PD nutrition Viet Nam project with British Petroleum (BP) for the INGO, Save the Children in the late 1980’s. He championed the use of the PD approach in business via his yearly course at the Oxford Said Business School and at many other venues and platforms. Over the decades, he provided his full and steadfast support to the PD Initiative and was instrumental in making the PD approach part of the mainstream behavior and social change approaches.
Muhammad Shafique is a sociologist with 20 years of experience in social and behavior change communication (SBCC). His aspiration is to bring about positive social and behavioral changes to improve the quality of life for all community members. Shafique’s encounter with Positive Deviance started in his home country Pakistan in the North East Region in 2001. He has applied the PD approach to maternal and newborn health, malaria prevention and control, dengue control, and polio eradication in Pakistan, Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar.
David Gasser is a free lance consultant who has been involved with the Positive Deviance Approach for over 17 years. He first encountered the approach through Jerry Sternin in Mexico in 2003, working on the PD Merk project. His sector of expertise with the PD include the private sector, public agencies, health care, and education in the US, Puerto Rico and a few countries in Latin America. David also volunteered many days working with the PD Initiative in PD training design and facilitation. Here, David reflects on his journey with Positive Deviance.
Gretchen Berggren has dedicated most of her life to children survival in the developing world and especially in Haiti. She was a health advisor at Save the Children when she introduced the Sternins to the work of Marian Zietlin and others on the use of Positive Deviance in Child nutrition. In Viet Nam, she provided invaluable advice and coaching on growth monitoring and other technical aspects of childhood nutrition.
Lars Thuesen is a global social change leader and strategic innovation facilitator with more than 20 years of experience as a leader, senior civil servant and consultant in the public sector and internationally. In 2014 Lars founded WIN (the Welfare Improvement Network) a network of international consultants that helps leaders, organizations and communities initiate and sustain social change using innovative approaches. He has used the Adaptive Leadership model and the Positive Deviance Approach to solve wicked social problems, e.g. gender and equality challenges, illiteracy in Roma communities and reducing violence among youth.
In this period of unprecedented events from the Covid-19 pandemic to climate upheaval, we decided it was appropriate to look at the positive side of our humanity collective endeavor to erase disparities, embrace diversity and address the complex problems of our time by looking at what is working against the odds. The Positive Deviance approach does that in a powerful way.
For those eager to use or curious to explore the many faces of the powerful and transformative Positive Deviance approach, you will find that the following case studies and publications contain the many ways and sectors this approach has been applied.
Researchers use the Positive Deviance approach to try to find out which conditions and circumstances in life stories of young people from marginalized Roma communities (MRC) are supportive and lead to success in formal education.
The Grub Hub was a place where parents could go with their children after the school run, where they are all provided with a hot meal and can relax and socialise together. The Grub Hub emerged as a project following Positive Deviance training in 2014 in Cambridgeshire and ultimately provided invaluable support to local families.
Using the PD approach, the Family Center of an NGO in Hawaii decided to focus on the strengths, assets, and resourcefulness of the Native Micronesian families and launched the Sundays Project, turning the educational tide. As a result, Native Micronesian families are now deeply engaged in, and contributing to, their children’s academic success.
Positive Deviance: A Data-Powered Approach to the Covid-19 Response
By: Richard Heeks and Basma Albanna, Centre for Digital Development, University of Manchester
Nations around the world are struggling with their response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In particular, they seek guidance on what works best in terms of preventive measures, treatments, and public health, economic and other policies. Can we use the novel approach of data-powered positive deviance to improve the guidance being offered?
Positive Deviance: Positive Outliers Matter
By: Jeremy Boy, Data Scientist, UNDP Accelerator Labs together with Andreas Gluecker, Project Manager, GIZ Data Lab
Together with the UNDP Accelerator Labs and GIZ projects in Ecuador, Mexico, Niger, and Somalia/ Somaliland, we are using combinations of administrative data, satellite imagery, urban data, social media data, and mobility data to identify positive deviants in such diverse contexts as the borders of the Amazon forest, public spaces in Mexico City, and pastoralist villages in Somaliland. Our goal is to identify locally-developed and well-adapted solutions that can help broader communities overcome the development challenges they face.
By: Lindsay Steele, Emma Orefuwa, Silvia Bino
Infectious disease outbreaks can have significant impact on individual health, national economies, and social well-being. Through early detection of an infectious disease, the outbreak can be contained at the local level, thereby reducing adverse effects on populations. However, current evaluation methods do not provide evidence-based suggestions or measurements on how to detect outbreaks earlier. Key conditions for earlier detection and their influencing factors remain unclear and unmeasured. Our analyses suggest that governance is the most important condition for earlier detection in both regions. Facilitating factors for earlier detection are risk communication activities such as information sharing, communication, and collaboration activities. Impeding factors are lack of communication, coordination, and leadership.
Positive Deviance for Dual-Method Promotion among Women in Uganda: A Qualitative Study
By: Hodaka Kosugi, Akira Shibanuma, Junko Kiriya, Ken Ing Cherng Ong, Stephen Mucunguzi, Conrad Muzoora, and Masamine Jimba
Dual-method use is the most reliable form of protection against unintended pregnancies and human immunodeficiency virus/sexually transmitted infections (HIV/STIs). Although dual-method use remains uncommon among women in stable relationships, some women do practice it. In this study, we explored the barriers that make dual-method use rare and the behaviors of women who practice dual-method use using a positive deviance framework in Uganda.
What do shrimps in Vietnam, prison keys in Denmark, and school schedules in Romania have in common?
They give us clues to how to respond to Covid-19 and other change challenges.
Click here to listen to this podcast episode featuring PD Facilitator Lars Thuesen!
Twice a year, the PD team releases a free email newsletter with the most up-to-date news, publications, and events from around the world for the PD community. Facilitators and case studies from a variety of fields are featured.
Our newsletter is created for both experienced practitioners and new followers of the PD initiative to showcase different ways of implementing PD in local communities and encourage discussion within the PD community.
Sign up for our bi-annual PD newsletters simply by scrolling to the bottom of any page of the PD website and entering your name and email address in the “Newsletter” section.
Arvind Singhal, professor at the University of Texas El Paso, is now compiling many new PD case studies such as some found in the Summer 2020 PD Newsletter into four PD monographs, all to be published in the next six months—in the 30th anniversary year of the PD approach.
The four volumes will be published through the Positively AbundANT Collaborative (a social media group of over 820 members) and will available on Amazon Kindle (so as to be available globally to anyone in hard and electronic copy). They will be priced at less than $9.99 so as to be affordable—keeping with the PD spirit.
In this video, the GIZ Data Lab shares updates on the Data Powered Positive Deviance (DPPD) blog, pilot programs, and network. DPPD is an international collective that is dedicated to utilizing big data to find effective locally developed solutions to complex problems.
To learn more about DPPD, please visit their blog.
This publication highlights “approaches that work" in facilitating the integration of Roma minority into the majority population of Slovakia with examples from four different villages.