Rate this book

The Power Of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve The World's Toughest Problems (2010)

by Richard Pascale(Favorite Author)

4.09 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1422110664 (ISBN13: 9781422110669)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Harvard Business Review Press

review 1: I had read about this book in another brilliant book (Switch by the Heath brothers). Completely inspiring - all the more so for the humility of the authors as they recognize that there are often forces at play that make this approach extremely challenging. I was most touched by the quote from Lao Tzu, so much so that reading it gave me goosebumps:Learn from the peoplePlan with the peopleBegin with what they haveBuild on what they know Of the best leadersWhen the task is accomplished The people all remark We have done it ourselvesIf you have ever worked to try to instigate social change, this book is a must-read.
review 2: excerpts from the bookAs a problem solving process, this approach requires retraining ourselves to pay attention differently – awakening mi... morends accustomed to overlooking outliers, and cultivating scepticism about the inevitable “that’s just the way it is.” Once this concept is grasped, attention to observable exceptions draws us naturally to the “who,” the “what,” and especially the “how.”Positive deviance is founded on the premise that at least one person in a community, working with the same resources as everyone else, has already licked the problem that confounds others. This individual is an outlier in the statistical sense – an exception, someone whose outcome deviates in a positive way from the norm. In most cases this person does not know he or she is doing anything unusual. Yet once the unique solution is discovered and understood, it can be adopted by the wider community and transform many lives. From the PD perspective, individual difference is regarded as a community resource. Community engagement is essential to discovering noteworthy variants in their midst and adapting their practices and strategies.The PD process is a tool for adaptive work. Unfortunately, we are drawn instinctively to the “technical” stuff – the “what” (specific practices and tools that make the individual positive deviants successful). That’s the easy part – and only 20 percent of the work. What matters far more is the “how” – the very particular journey that each community must engage in to mobilize itself, overcome resignation and fatalism, discover its latent wisdom, and put this wisdom into practice. This bears repeating: the community must make the discovery itself. It alone determines how chance can be disseminated through the practice of new behaviour – not through explanation or edict.The positive deviance approach is not suitable for everything. As noted earlier, it is unnecessary when a technical solution (e.g. drought-resistant corn, a vaccine for smallpox) exists. But the process excels over most alternatives when addressing problems that, to repeat, (1) are enmeshed in a complex social system, (2) require social and behavioural change, and (3) entail solutions that are rife with unforeseeable or unintended consequences. It provides a fresh alternative when problems are viewed as intractable (i.e. other solutions haven’t worked). It redirects attention from “what’s wrong” to “what’s right” – observable exceptions that succeed against all odds.The social fabric of each community has its own distinct pattern. This system holds intractable problems in place and must be unfrozen to allow new behaviors and mind-sets to evolve. The secret sauce of the PD process is how it engages and transforms the social dynamics that have kept things stuck.Paradoxically, while the PD process achieves all this by perturbing the social system, as compared to other approaches, it has the lowest perturbation to impact ratio. That’s because it turns to solutions already proven within the system versus importing foreign solutions that arouse scepticism at best and outright sabotage at worst. less

Download links for: The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems

Advertising