hen faced with adverse circumstances
most people will muddle through but some will deviate from the norm doing much better or worse than normal. Those that do worse than normal are called negative deviants and are what we normally think of when we think of deviants. However there are also people who thrive in the most disadvantageous situation. These are the positive deviants and much can be learned from them.
So why are they succeeding while others fail. The Fundamental Attribution Error leads people to leap to the conclusion that positive deviants are simply better or that they have a hidden advantage or that they are cheating. However the usual explanation is they have different perspectives, approaches, tactics, strategies and/or attitudes. Things that could be copied by their less successful brethren.
Reasons Successful Strategies Don't Spread
Why aren't the successful techniques of positive deviants not copied by their underperforming peers.
There are several reasons.
Lack of Communication
There has been a bit of work in this area, both in how to improve communication and what hinders it and what encourages it.
This is a well known effect where workers sitting near high performer also have increased performance, lending weight to the notion that the ability to succeed can be learned.
Are both methods to share success strategies between peers.
A systematic discipline to spread this kind of information in an organised way.
Motivation to Learn
Unfortunately the people who seek out information by deliberately hang out with high performers to get tips or attend events to develop professionally are also the kind of people who are likely to already be positive deviants.
Preconceived Ideas
Why would you bother learning a better way when you already know the best way? There is often an obvious conventional common sense way of doing things, the way people who are getting average results are doing it. Unfortunately conventional wisdom is often more conventional than wise and common sense is more common than sensible. Those who are getting unusual results are unlikely to be using the usual methods. There is a reason that the first step in learning a new discipline is often unlearning everything you learned as a layperson. High performers may even be criticised or viewed with suspicion for not doing things the proper way. This effect will be greatly magnified if the high performer belongs to a minority.
Conformity
People feel a need to belong. Sharing beliefs and activities is a way to achieve this, bucking the trend can feel uncomfortable.
Doing something different can also be risky. If you follow the herd and fail then at least you can point to others and say they did not succeed either. However if you attempt change and fail you are on your own.
The difference between a odd ball and a leader is that all important first follower. However if your follower is also marinized or low status you may still have trouble getting traction.
Fundamental Attribution Error
If you believe it is all down to talent then you are not going to be experimenting, innovating or capturing others strategies. This harks back to the growth mindset.
Combatting the Savior Complex
When faced with people in trouble the temptation is to parachute in and rescue them using your own knowledge and experience. However techniques and strategies don't always transfer between situations. World nutrition is full of failures were NGOs failed to listen to locals and introduced crops that were eaten by local pest or worse had the opposite problem and spread out of control. And even if you do have the solution unless you make listening your first step you are not going to have the buy-in to make your solution work.
The people at coalface usually know the solution to their problems, its just that, this knowledge is unevenly distributed.
Positive Deviancy in the Real World
The Case of the Well Fed Child
The original and most famous example of leveraging positive deviancy for impact was Jerry and Monique Sternin's work with Save the Children in Vietnam in the 1990s.
Having insufficient funds and facing hostility from the Vietnamese government, they turned their disadvantages into an advantage by embracing the need for an unconventional approach. They conducted a health survey of a poor village measuring the well being of the children of poor families. They identified multiple positive deviants, families that despite being the poorest of the poor still managed to keep their children healthy.
Talking with these families the Sternins identified three factors that would allow any poor villager too keep their children well nourished. They recruited these parents as teachers and distributed this knowledge through free cooking events. Having the cooking ingredients (which only cost the time to gather them) be the price of admission both kept costs low and became a important part of the lesson.
Malnutrition fell dramatically in the area covered by the Sternins' program and the skeptical Vietnamese government was won over.
Follow up studies showed a long term improvement on children's health long after the program ended.
Positive Deviancy in My Own Career
The Case of the Speedy Data Processer
Many years ago I was working in the geophysical survey industry writing software to transform geophysical data into a visual form (a map) so that experts could identify possible mining sites. My software was used by data processers, while most of the data processers were taking 5-6 hours to produce a map, there was one that was completing maps in almost half that time.
The data processers used a series of utilities selected from a suite of applications build and maintained over decades. These applications were applied to very large datasets for that time, therefore long run times weren't unexpected. Much of the functionality of these applications was only necessary in a small percentage of use cases. The speedy data processer was using configuration options to turn off unnecessary processing. The other data processers were unaware of these options and even when they were aware of them they tended to leave the options on 'just in case'.
I went though the processing steps one by one, optimizing some, changing some from default on to default off, and removing many that the domain experts identified as obsolete. The most time intensive application went from taking three hours to finishing in twelve minutes. I reduced the end to end process by more than a factor of three.
This improvement was made possible because as I was working in the map room I noticed one of my co-workers was twice as productive as the others and asked the right questions.
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