The document discusses the Positive Deviance (PD) approach, which focuses on behavioral and social change through community-led solutions. It highlights a successful case in Vietnam where malnutrition among children was reduced by 85% by identifying and promoting simple practices from well-nourished families. Key principles include community ownership of the problem and solutions, avoiding best practices, and fostering sustainable change through local engagement and discovery.

1. What KM
practitioners can
learn from
Positive Deviance
Credit: Flickr Sondra Stewart
ActKM, Canberra
October 2010
David Gurteen

2. The Vietnam Story
Credit: Flickr Sondra Stewart

3. The Vietnam Story
 PD was first applied by Jerry and Monique Sternin through their work with
Save the Children in Vietnam in the 1990s.
 At the start of the pilot 64% of children in the pilot villages were
malnourished.
 Through a PD inquiry, the villagers found poor parents in the community
that had well-nourished children.
 They went on to discover that these families were feeding their children
foods that other villagers considered inappropriate; they washed their
children’s hands before meals, and fed them three to four times a day
instead of the typical two meals a day.
 It was these simple “deviant behaviours” that made all the difference but
instead of simply telling parents what to do differently (or creating a best
practice document!), they helped the villagers design a program to act
their way into a new way of thinking.
 To attend a feeding session, parents were required to bring one of the new
foods. They brought their children and while sharing meals, learned to
cook the new foods.
 At the end of the two year pilot, malnutrition fell by 85%.

4. The Power of Positive Deviance

5. Stories
 Childhood malnutrition in Vietnam
 Female circumcision in Egypt
 Girl soldiers in Uganda
 Infant mortality in Pakistan
 Hospital Infections
 Pharmaceutical sales at Merck
 Goldman Sachs

6. The PD Process
The PD approach is best suited to problems that require behaviour and social
change.
Five basic steps carried out by members of the community:
1. Define the problem and desired outcome.
2. Determine the common practices.
3. Discover the uncommon but successful behaviours and strategies
through observation and inquiry.
4. Design an action learning initiative based on the inquiry findings and
execute the project.
5. Monitor and evaluate the project. Share improvements as they occur.
Discern the effectiveness of the project.

7. What we can learn!

8. Principles
 Avoid grandiose aims.
 Start with the problem.
 Participants are not coerced.
 The community discovers the solution for itself.
 If solution repeated - start again.
 The facilitators only teach and support the process.
 Key success factor is OWNERSHIP of the problem and the solution.
 Best practice is avoided.
 All stakeholders are encouraged to be involved.

9. Avoid grandiose aims
 Avoid grandiose aims.
 The approach is evolutionary.
Knowledge Management should be focused on
real, tangible intractable problems not
aspirational goals.
It should deal pragmatically with the
evolutionary possibilities of the present rather
then seeking idealistic solutions.
Dave Snowden

10. Start with the problem
 Start with the problem.
 The community defines and/or
frames the problem.
Credit: Flickr tph567

11. Involve everyone
 Communities have the people and the
ability to self-organize to respond
effectively to a common problem.
 Know-how is not concentrated in the
leadership of a community or in external
experts but is distributed throughout the
community.
 All stakeholders are encouraged to be
involved.

12. Don’t do things to people
 Participants are not coerced.
 They can opt in or opt out.
Credit: Flickr tph567

13. Allow people to take responsibility
 Communities already have the solutions to
the problems they face and they are the
best people to solve them.
 Allow the community to discover the
solution for itself.
 Never give them the solution.
 And never teach the solution

14. Don’t take short cuts
 If the solution is repeated in
another community then start
again.
Credit: Flickr haechoo

15. Seek sustainable solutions
 The PD approach enables the
community to seek and discover
sustainable responses to a given
problem.
 Because the demonstrably successful
but not widely adopted behaviours
are already practiced in the
community.

16. Only facilitate
 The facilitators only teach and
support the process.
 They are not experts in the problem
or the solution.
 On no account do they contribute
directly to defining the problem or
the solution.

17. Let the community own the problem
 Key success factor is OWNERSHIP
of the problem and the solution.
Credit: Flickr eurodrifter

18. Avoid best practice
 Best practice should be avoided.
 It can trigger the NIH syndrome.
Credit: Flickr oxfam-italia

19. Quotations from the book

20. There is no silver bullet
Discoveries from one community cannot be
repackaged and provided to another as a
silver bullet.
That's a "best practice" rollout and it
invariably evokes the immune rejection
response.

21. The objective is engagement
The real objective isn't just "knowledge" or
getting an 80--20 understanding of the
situation.
The overriding objective is engagement,
creating a buzz, mobilizing people to take
action.

22. Learning is shaped by social context
Explicit knowledge, conventionally delivered
like pizza (neat boxes with toppings of
concepts, theories, best practices and war
stories), is consumed by the brain but not
metabolized into action.
The learning we call intuition, know-how
and common sense gets into the blood
stream through osmosis. It is shaped by
social context.

23. We are walking on a trampoline
Unintended consequences get to the heart of why
you never really understand an adaptive problem
until you have solved it.
Problems morph and "solutions" often point to
deeper problems.
In social life, as in nature, we are walking on a
trampoline.
Every inroad reconfigures the environment we tread
on.

24. Don’t suppress variation
Corporations, in the name of efficiency, suppress
variation by "getting all the ducks in line."
To optimize productivity, they evolve highly refined
and internally consistent operating systems.
Payoff - results - as long as the music lasts.
But ... all that streamlining and re-engineering limits
diversity, suppresses self-organization ... and
curtails a bottom up emergent response to
disruptive change.

25. Information has a social life
 Contrary to widespread faith in
"communication" and "knowledge transfer,"
information has a social life,
 and unless new insights are embedded in
the social system they evaporate.

26. It is practice that advances knowledge
Knowledge does not advance practice. Rather
practice advances knowledge.
It is easier to change behaviour by practicing it rather
than being taught about it.
“It is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking
than think your way into a new way of acting”

27. The Vietnam Story

28. David GURTEEN
Gurteen Knowledge
Fleet, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 7774 178 650
Email: david.gurteen@gurteen.com
www.gurteen.com

29. Licence
 You may use these slides under the
following Creative Commons Licence
 Attribution-Share Alike 2.0
 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/uk/