Dear Positive Deviance Friends and Fans,

After a year of virtual conversations and communications with other PD facilitators, this newsletter will be brief in content but potent in meaning and potential impact.

From the frontier work in old age abuse in Serbia to ongoing collaboration among the Japanese PD network which produced a new guide, via the pioneering use of the Positive Deviance approach as a strategy to increase impact in education of the Design Thinking methodology spearheaded by the Stanford Design School team, the Positive Deviance approach continues to inspire and challenge educators, behavior and social change consultants, donors and academics.

The Positive Deviance approach provides a unique and innovative format that INVITES the frontline workers or staff, community members or other entities, to uncover existing solutions to seemingly intractable problems on their own. This proposition to shift from a usually deficit-based business to an asset-based mindset galvanizes them to seek those sustainable solutions, often referred as “solution mining”.

The process of focusing on “what is working NOW” is at the cutting edge of common sense and reveals simple, cost effective, easily replicable or adoptable sustainable strategies. You will read about some remarkable examples of this process in the Serbian stories and the education examples provided by the Stanford “D” school.

We hope that these stories will inspire you to venture into new applications of the PD approach in fields such as power and water conservation, human migration and pollution, and all issues linked to climate change, the most pressing and fundamental global crisis of our time.

On the eve of the lunar New Year and the solar New Year just behind us, Linh and I wish you a healthy, productive and positive year.

As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions via email.

Best wishes for the new year,
Monique Sternin
Co-founder, Positive Deviance Approach

Linh Nguyen
Manager, Positive Deviance Website

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.

Learn more →

Geronto housewives are trained to recognize victims of violence among users of services in the home and inform professionals that an elderly person suffers violence, but they can also point to their own and positive practices that the elderly used to defend themselves from violence.

Elderly people are often lonely, and Geronto housewives play an important role in alleviating this phenomenon.

Additionally, a PD workshop was organized to reduce various forms of violence against the elderly in Novi Sad, Serbia. They are in the process of discovering and disseminating successful practical behaviors - positive deviance solutions - to reduce economic violence, neglect and isolation.

The following stories were collected by a team of researchers from the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade in cooperation with colleagues from the Centers for Social Work in Užice, Plandište and Valjevo. They were assisted by colleagues Lars Thuesen and Mads Fly-Hansen from Denmark.

Learn more →

The Stanford d.school’s K12 Lab is focused on obliterating opportunity gaps in K-12 education by helping schools apply a design thinking approach to messy, complex, systemic problems that impact their students.

When former d.school fellow Marc Chun was introduced to positive deviance via The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems, he formed a small project team to explore this newly realized (by us) process; this process seemed so intuitive and ripe for application across under-resourced K-12 schools struggling with systemic problems. Why hadn’t the process taken hold in American schools? What were we missing? And, what might happen if we applied a human-centered design lens to this asset-based approach? How could this process help advance equitable solutions in schools?

And so, the Positive Deviance for Educators project was born.

Learn more →