What is the Positive Deviance model?
According to Richard Tanner Pascale and Jerry Sternin, there are always positive exceptions to rules concerning business problems. Somehow, a few isolated groups or individuals, operating with the same constraints and resources as everyone else, are functioning better. In the HBR of May 2005, they describe their Positive Deviance method. This holds that managers must actively look for those extraordinarily successful groups and individuals, and bring the isolated success strategies of these “positive deviants” into the mainstream. Best practice Change Management methods are not good at realizing this. That’s why Pascale and Sternin suggest to ensure the participation of the members of the community which you want to change in the process of discovery. In this way you can make them the evangelists of their own conversion experience. Also they describe a six-step positive deviance model.
