Positive Deviance in Business
Or that time I stood like an idiot and got severely stung by wasps
I met Monique Sternin in the Ecuadorian jungle.
She was the external team lead, and I was a volunteer for CESSEC. We were doing fieldwork, researching positive deviance techniques made by women community leaders in different parts of rural Ecuador.
The goal? To identify positive outliers in a community, or experts, at handling sticky corrupt situations.
So, what happened?
The entertaining part is that Monique saved me from terrible harm. You see, a few team members had taken the opportunity to tour a remote area of the Ecuadorian Amazon called Shiri-Puno.
The earth-colored water lapped against the polished grey-toned river stones. We were about to board a wooden canoe to travel through the Amazon basin. When two dogs ran towards us suddenly. Their fur prickled against my shin as they weaved around my legs, wagging tails and loppy tongues.
They were up to mischief.
One of them pushed his rust-brown shaggy front paws against a tree and shook it forcefully.
I heard white noise on the radio. I looked around bewildered and saw two things at once.
Our guides jumped on the canoe and pushed away.
Monique turned her back towards me.
Hundreds of wasps flew out of their nest, enraged at being disturbed.
I looked up towards the blue rainforest sky and noticed at the periphery of my vision a black cloud engulfing me.
And then Monique did what all heroes do.
Once she turned and noticed that I had decided to stand, like a 90s cartoon character, on the spot, waiting for the piano to fall on my foolish little head, she went back to save me.
Of course, once she took her first step in my direction, the entire team followed.
Because that’s what leaders do, they inspire every team member to be better.
So, why is this relevant?
This is a simplified example of Positive Deviance.
We, Monique and I, were both outliers in this scenario because we deviated from what most people there did.
Monique’s behavior surpassed the rest; I sucked and got stung repeatedly.
In this scenario, Monique was a positive deviant.
Positive Deviance
There’s more to Positive Deviance than my silly little chart; I highly encourage you to check out their site.
And watch this video:
I mean, Monique did not earn the title of White Lioness from a tribe chief for nothing.
She’s one of the bravest women I’ve ever met. I truly believe that Positive Deviance has contributed more to the world than any other method/approach.
Why should this matter to you?
Positive Deviance can help your business, too.
“The Positive Deviance approach is an asset-based, problem-solving, and community-driven approach that enables the community to discover these successful behaviors and strategies and develop a plan of action to promote their adoption by all concerned.”
What can you do about it?
Somewhere in your business, you have rising stars. Exceptional employees constantly invent new ways to complete processes efficiently or with fewer mistakes.
These are the happy outliers in your organization. Your positive deviants.
How do you find them?
Our team is currently in the process of re-documenting our processes.
The person in charge of this approached me with a list of questions that she would be asking each team member during their initial meeting.
Question #5 gave me more imaginary hives than The Hunger Games.
5. Do you think we have to rebuild the flow of tasks at the company?
❌ Doing everything in a new way would set us back months and will not benefit the company. It could break us.
This question should have been:
5. How can we improve the flow of tasks at the company?
When recording processes, be it with Loom, Zoom, or Voice Notes, the goal of the PM should also be to find these growth hacks made by current positive deviants in an organization.
👉Then we should all learn them. We must share them with the rest of us.
My advice to the team lead was:
“Try to find small - incremental - techniques that other people use to optimize their processes that the entire team could adopt.
Small tweaks that will save time > than upending our entire business.”
💚 And that’s my suggestion to you.
Now, if you want to see a very dorky video that I made of the trip, go right ahead: