Here’s another book that I read, two pages at a time for more than a year. I found it while researching for my own work on collaborative professional learning. Positive Deviance is the concept of coaching a community (social or professional) to confront their own intractable problems by identifying those within their own group, who have the same resources and same challenges, but fare better than most. The group then takes these lessons and grows them to overcome, or reduce the effects of, their collective challenges.
The book defines these situations and the Positive Deviance (PD) approach through a series of vignettes ranging from malnutrition in third-world countries, to overcoming cultural practices of female genitalia mutilation, to improving pharmaceutical sales in a global corporation. The variety of contexts show that the lessons of PD are not limited to one field, and that technical solutions of efficiency or effectiveness will not resolve adaptive problems, that is problems that are socially complex and require changes in behavior. The authors confirm that expert consultants are not the most effective for these situations which inevitably have unintended consequences that expertise cannot predict.
Obviously, PD gets a rap for being inefficient, however when pursued from within it is an extremely effective form of continuous improvement. Thus, while it sounds like a tinge of Management 101, a true leader would need to approach this book with a imaginative and open mind and must leave any sensibility of top-down management at the door. This fits my paradigm of leadership, which is organic, embedded, and quite frankly the messy work of helping people get where they want to be. The authors also speak to the problems of taking this type of improvement process to scale, which is a concept I struggle to accept as effective…the larger we attempt to control, the more problems we create to solve.
What particularly interested me as I perused the book each night, was the overlap in cognitive science that I saw displayed through social experiments and change. Groups of people do function like an individual brain in many situations, and this can be guided metacognitively to good ends. My favorite quote, “The good news: once people have tasted self-generated success and flourished from their own wisdom, the foundation for learning is laid.” As a teacher, this resonates how we experience the learning with one student, ourselves, or our larger group.
I give this book 4 Sutterstars for its content, but expect it to become redundant in vignette towards the end. The first three quarters provides the meat to understand PD.