The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems
by Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin & Monique Sternin
Renowned management expert, Richard Pascale, and social change pioneers Jerry and Monique Sternin team up to describe the field experiences and the "secret sauce" behind a powerful new idea. Over the past two and a half decades, their work has achieved breakthroughs in every continent except Antarctica and changed the lives of millions of people on the planet.
Description
Think of the toughest problems in your organization or community. What if they'd already been solved, and you didn't even know it?
In this inspiring and paradigm-shifting book, Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin turn conventional ideas about problem-solving upside down and reveal a counterintuitive new approach. Their advice? Harness the power of "positive deviants"—the few individuals in a group who find unique ways to look at, and overcome, seemingly insoluble problems.
Positive deviants see solutions where others don't. And they're the key to spreading and sustaining needed change.
With vivid, first-hand stories of how positive deviance has alleviated some of the world's toughest problems (including malnutrition in Vietnam and staph infections in hospitals), the authors illuminate this approach's core principles and practices, including:
Initiating an open, curious inquiry into the nature of the problem
Using innovative behaviors to shape new thinking, rather than vice versa
Confounding the organizational "immune response" seeking to sustain the status quo
The Power of Positive Deviance unveils a powerful new way to tackle the thorniest challenges in your own company and community.
Buy the Book: Amazon, Harvard Business Review Store
Authors
Three authors, braided strands, complementary talents intertwining across time. Our affiliation has shaped lives, contributed to marriages, and altered careers over the two decades of collaboration in this work.
Jerry Sternin began his profession in 1962 as a Peace Corps volunteer on the island of Mindanao, Philippines. There, on a narrow wooden bridge in the tiny village of Marawi, he met Richard Pascale, on active duty in the U.S. Navy. A lifelong relationship took root.
Jerry became Associate Peace Corps Director, Nepal, and Richard began his graduate education at Harvard Business School (HBS). When Jerry's overseas tour ended, Richard's introduction paved the way for his appointment as Counseling Dean at HBS. A man of many talents, Jerry left HBS four years later to devote himself to one of his many interests—cooking. He opened a restaurant, Chautara, (Nepalese for resting place) in Pembroke, Massachusetts. Chautara was awarded a five star rating in the Boston Globe.
Jerry's association with Harvard altered the course of his life. There he met Monique, a French citizen in pursuit of her master's degree. They married, "honeymooned" on a Peace Corps directorship in Mauritania, and returned to Harvard in 1981 for Jerry's postgraduate work in Asian Studies with a concentration in Mandarin. In the course of study, they were introduced to a peripheral research distinction—positive deviance—a term used to categorize the outliers occasionally encountered in fieldwork (i.e., those who defy the norm and succeed when others are failing). At the time the construct inspired no particular epiphany. It was filed away in the cerebral cortex.
Richard Pascale, meanwhile, had received his doctorate from Harvard Business School and commenced life as a professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. His interests lay at the intersection of strategic ambition and the attendant requirement for individual and organizational change. By the late 1980s he had become a respected teacher and bestselling author. Expertise also attracted consulting assignments, one of them with John Browne, newly named head of British Petroleum's exploration division.
The Sternins, now with a young son, left Harvard and rotated through a series of Save the Children directorships in Bangladesh and the Philippines. In 1989, the NGO made an offer that was hard to refuse: open the first field office in Vietnam. First hurdle: the venture needed funding, but host sensitivities were such that the funds could not come from an American source. Richard, still consulting to BP, learned of the company's plans to conduct offshore seismic tests in Vietnam's territorial waters. He introduced the Sternins' work to John Browne. A seed grant of $250,000 was provided to underwrite the startup. BP's support continued over the duration of the project.
The next hurdle surfaced shortly thereafter, in 1990. Scars of the "American War" (as it is known in Vietnam) were both physically and psychologically manifest. The Ministry of Health wished to focus on the widespread prevalence of childhood malnutrition in rural Vietnam. As described in chapter 2, that the proposed collaboration with an all-too-recent enemy was not straightforward. Preliminary visits before embarking on the venture made clear that receptivity was tentative, access to the population limited, and the window during which the Sternins must prove themselves short. What followed was the first of many successes using the PD approach over the next thirty years.
The sage, the steward, and the scholar; intertwined lives with complementary talents, joined by a profound appreciation of the capacity of people to discover solutions for themselves.
Jerry Sternin (who died on December 11, 2008) combined deep wisdom with an uncanny ability to connect with people of all persuasions. Maestro of many PD workshops across the years, he was charismatic, funny, self-deprecating, and engaging. His warmth and understanding were transformational for the many he touched.
Monique Sternin has a master's degree from Paris University in American literature and civilization. In 1975, she traveled to India and Nepal and developed an interest in cross-cultural communication. After a teaching stint in Paris, she moved to the US for graduate study receiving a master's degree from Harvard School of Education in 1978. Monique brings rigor to fieldwork: she was the steward of the learning, translating artistic impulse into replicable process. What works? What doesn't? What empirical foundation must be laid to determine whether verifiable progress has been made? The antithesis of a sober empiricist, Monique has a remarkable capacity to blend into the community she serves, listen at their feet, and see the world through the eyes of those she works with. As a result of these latter sensibilities, the PD process "tail" has never wagged the change problem's "dog." PD is not a doctrine. It has evolved as a disciplined yet highly malleable methodology.
Richard, author, teacher, and consultant, has focused on the challenges of large-scale change. In the fieldwork described here, he played a background role, documenting the process and occasionally cofacilitating workshops. He observed the Sternins in action in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Myanmar, Uganda, Argentina, and the Pittsburgh VA hospital. His contributions extended to posing skeptical questions about the mysterious bits, in particular whether PD constituted anything distinctly new. He has been involved in efforts to apply PD in the private sector. Finally, as the most experienced writer on the team, Richard took the lead in editing his coauthors' narratives, developing explanatory material, and assembling the pieces into a coherent whole.
Book Reviews
New York Journal of Books Review
After an economic meltdown, a decade of war in the Middle East, and a gnawing sense of vulnerability, we face a fork in the road of our national journey: Are our institutions — be they government, corporate, religious, or nonprofit — still serving us well and, if not, how should they change?
This is more than red-state blue-state, liberal-versus-conservative cable TV fodder. Rather, it reflects a nagging ambivalence toward academia, bureaucrats, and leaders who claim to have the "big" ideas, administer giant programs, and play the politics that too many have become hopeless.
Such doubts ultimately derive from the way we address problems at all levels across society. Will a 2,500-page healthcare bill really address the costs and gaps of medical treatment for three-hundred million Americans? Can the Earth’s climate be corrected with a regime that penalizes energy usage? Can a religion regain trust in the wake of priestly scandal?
More to the point, who is empowered to create such solutions?
This last question lies at the heart of The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems. The business professor and consultant Richard Pascale, along with the husband-wife team of Jerry and Monique Sternin, present a problem-solving approach that emphasizes three "Cs" — community, commitment and communication — to resolve seemingly intractable issues.
Contrast that with our current governance model, which historian Walter Russell Mead calls a gnostocracy — the rule of experts. In a perfect gnostocracy, the smartest, best-educated people make all the decisions for the rest of us. Hence, William F. Buckley’s oft-stated preference to be ruled by the first three-hundred names in the Cambridge telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard.
In their way, Pascale and the Sternins open that phonebook and seek those who have found their own solutions — a bottoms-up approach in synch with our Toquevillian bloodlines.
Also, by flipping problem perceptions on their head — addressing not "why are Vietnamese babies malnourished?" but rather "why are some of the babies at optimal weight?" — solution seekers can cut to the chase. The key is to focus on those local outliers, the "positive deviants," who have already figured out the solution and identify the secrets of their success. As important, communities are then mobilized based on their norms and culture to adopt the same habits and behaviors.
Easier said than done, as the authors are the first to admit. Whether it is in the corridors of Merck or the houses of Egyptian villages, nobody likes change imposed from the outside regardless of its viability. As formidable an obstacle: Leaders hate to give up power. Thus, much of The Power of Positive Deviance is devoted to how a community must work to teach and change itself — and that means each individual having a stake in a successful outcome.
At first glance, Pascale and the Sternins may seem to be late passengers on the "Gladwell-Freakanomics" bandwagon — the literature of individual genius and quirky economics. Far from it. Their book is closer in spirit to James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds and Glenn Harlan Reynolds’s An Army of Davids, but it takes a deeper dive with impressive results. The authors’ case studies, though sometimes related in a breathless tone (particularly in the chapter on curbing the practice of female circumcision in Egypt), are candid about the power and limitations of their method.
But the successes they document are striking: a 30–50 percent reduction in childhood malnutrition in communities across forty-one countries; a significant prevention of antibiotic resistant bacteria in three U.S. hospitals; and a 30-percent decrease in girl trafficking in poor villages in East Java. Even better, Pascale and the Sternins present their methodology in a way any layperson can understand.
For a society fraught with flawed adversarial (lawsuits, politics, media) and top-down (executive, regulatory, legislative) approaches to systemic challenges, The Power of Positive Deviance deserves more than a cursory glance — it should be required reading for the powers that be. How about a copy delivered to the in-box of every Congressman and cabinet secretary for starters?
Reviewer Robert Nersesian has spent his career in public relations, working for or advising Fortune 500 companies. He is currently president of the consulting firm Public Advocacy Associates, LLC.
OVO Views: Conversations about Innovation
What I like about The Power of Positive Deviance is that it stipulates that unlikely people solve tough problems. I was reminded of this recently when we learned that one of the first winners of an Innocentive challenge was a person who worked out a solution in his garage. Often the best innovators are "deviants" who don't fit comfortably in the corporate world but their very nature, perspectives and insights are what is missing to solve important, intractable problems.
Another lesson and one of my favorite statements in the book is: "It's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting". From an innovation point of view, experimenting constantly and innovating regularly leads to new strategies and new processes, when "top down" strategic direction often fails.
"In trying to tackle ‘intractable' challenges, we often import fixes from outside the target group or community and, with the best of intentions, fail. Surprisingly, the wisdom often lies within: the diversity within any group hides ingenious solutions awaiting the right process and leadership to uncover them. The Power of Positive Deviance shows the way to discover, implement, and scale hidden innovations that work because they are already consonant with the culture."
— Ronald Heifetz, Harvard Kennedy School and Cambridge Leadership Associates
"Complexity, scarcity, and culture are now code words for why the state of the world is not improving faster. The Power of Positive Deviance breaks those codes and shows in a variety of contexts how social entrepreneurs can achieve concrete results today."
— Lee Howell, Managing Director, Head of Programming, World Economic Forum
"Vividly told by pioneers of positive deviance (PD), these stories from around the world and across all sectors demonstrate the power of the people to solve intractable problems. Cheap, sustainable, indigenous, developed slowly in order to deliver quickly, PD solutions derive from insight distributed throughout a community, unleashed with the right questions. Read this and see: PD is an idea whose time has come."
— Barbara Waugh, PhD, Director (retired), Hewlett-Packard
"This is a phenomenal book about how radical reform actually occurs. Written in simple, moving language, it deepens our thinking about the power of community and local wisdom. The Power of Positive Deviance single-handedly replaces your entire bookshelf on change management. With great stories and useful methodology, it is required reading for anyone wanting to make a difference in the world."
—Peter Block, author of The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods and Community: The Structure of Belonging
"This book speaks to all who seek creative solutions in the face of seemingly intractable problems. The authors combine inspiring accounts of bringing about such solutions—from overcoming childhood malnutrition in poor villages to cutting back on devastating hospital infections—with indispensable practical advice for breaching entrenched barriers to change."
—Sissela Bok, author of Lying and Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science
"It is a truism that some of the most impactful ideas are the most simple—that a new way of looking at things can change the world. Positive deviance is such an idea. People on the front lines have often already found creative solutions. The job of leadership then becomes identifying these people and spreading their wisdom."
Dr. Charles MacCormack, President, Save the Children
"If you've ever run from a change because it felt too overwhelming, this book will bring you hope. No one has catalyzed more change, on more issues, in more places in the world, than Jerry and Monique Sternin. Learn the power of positive deviance—and take hope."
Chip Heath, coauthor of Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard