Book Review: The Power of Positive Deviance

The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems
Richard Pasquale, Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin
Harvard Business Press (2010)

For those who are unfamiliar with the terms “outliers” and “positive deviance,” the former refers to “an observation or phenomenon that is numerically distant from the rest of the data,” an “extreme deviation from the mean.” Malcolm Gladwell has written a book, Outliers: The Story of Success, in which he examines a number of individuals such as Bill Gates who become peak performers. As for “positive deviance,” Richard Pasquale, Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin explain it as an awkward, oxymoronic term. “The concept is simple: look for outliers who succeed against all odds…The basic premise is this: (1) Solutions to seemingly intractable problems already exist, (2) they have been discovered by members of the community itself, and (3) these innovators (individual positive deviants) have succeeded even though they share the same constraints and barriers as others.”

The co-authors acknowledge that the positive deviance process is not suitable for everything and suggest that “the process excels over most alternatives when addressing problems that “(1) are enmeshed in a complex social system, (2) require social and behavioral change, and (3) entail solutions that are rife with unforeseeable or unintended consequences.” Also, this process should be at least considered when the given problems are viewed as “intractable” after prior solutions failed. Moreover, the process redirects attention from “what’s wrong” to “what’s right” – observable exceptions that succeed “against all odds.”

The bulk of the material in this book focuses on how the PD approach has helped to alleviate some of the world’s toughest problems associated with childhood malnutrition in Vietnam, female circumcision in Egypt, hospital infections, “early wins, squandered gains” at Merck, and “girl soldiers” in Uganda. In these and other situations, the co-authors explain a natural progression of change within evolutionary systems that can be incorporated into the PD approach: change can disrupt prolonged equilibrium, “a precursor to death or stagnation”; an invitation to become involved in change requires those who accept to vacate a comfort zone (what James O’Toole characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom”) and share ownership of challenges to orthodoxies that create turbulence; change agents become self-organized as new forms and new solutions emerge from the inevitable tumult; and of course, there are unintended consequences because living systems “do not follow a linear path. One can disturb them in a manner that approximates a desired outcome – but never fully direct them.”

The information and insights that Richard Pasquale, Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin provide in abundance substantially increase their reader’s (this reader’s) understanding of “nature’s way” (i.e. modularization, selective variation, preservation of cultural and biological DNA, and the natural progression of change) and, especially, the implications for those in positions of authority. They call for “nothing less than a role reversal in which experts become learners, teachers become students, and authority figures become catalysts for bottom-up change.” In my opinion, this book is an operations manual for change initiatives that could perhaps save the human race. I invite those who challenge that assertion to read…and then re-read…this book.

Execution And Innovation – Two Failures Of The Gulf Coast Oil Disaster

We live in a “if he/she said it, I won’t even listen” era.  That can be a mistake.  People with whom you usually disagree may have something worthwhile to say. So, before you pass judgment on who said this, listen to what she said.  (In other words, some will be fans; others will be tempted to reject her out of hand.  Please, just consider the argument).

Last night, Rachel Maddow reported from Louisisana, and showed us from up-close the effects of the gulf oil spill.  And, more importantly, she showed us the failures of the containment and clean-up technologies.  Her report was filled with video images of the region.  She was accompanied by scientists/professors who clearly knew the problems discussed.

She visited the Leno show (I saw her report; I did not see the Leno segment), and here is Huffington Post’s summary of the Leno visit:

Throughout the segment, Maddow stressed that the oil industry has not done enough to improve safety technologies in the past 40 years, and that even the limited clean-up technology was not being properly used.

“The oil industry generally…hasn’t come up with any new clean-up technology since before I was born,” she said. “The technology is so lame…But even that lame technology that we have, we’re not doing it right…we could be doing a much better job.”

I cannot get her report out of my head, and concluded that this entire situation provides a snapshot of business success and failure in one very big, tragic story.

If you have read this blog at all; if you read business books at all; you know that there are two absolute essentials for business success:  #1 is innovation, #2 is execution.

#1 – Innovation: Know the next thing to do, and do it better than it was done before, and better than anyone else is doing it now; and keep getting better at it, or someone will pass you by as they get better at it than you are.

#2 – Execution: Whatever you do, do it as well as it can be done.  Do not mess it up.  Execute!

The gulf oil disaster is a failure in both of these business success principles.

By the way, I’m only focusing in this post about the aftermath.  It is also true that the execution in the actual drilling, and especially in proper and careful set up for the use of the blowout preventer, and other “fail-safe” steps, was a classic execution failure.

But this is what Rachel Maddow had to say, and her argument is pretty much a slam-dunk.

Oil inside the booms that were supposed to protect the fragile marsh and wetlands from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico at Pass A Loutre, Louisiana, USA, 30 May 2010.

First, the containment and clean-up technology is not being done well – what we have here is a failure to execute.  She showed video of oil containment boom dislodged, boom washed ashore, boom clearly untended.   The boom, which can be successful, cannot be successful without proper execution in deployment and use.  And in much of the case (way too much of the case, as her report documented) boom is simply not being placed and maintained properly.  Thus, oil has reached the shore in far too many places, even in places where boom has been placed to protect the shore – because of poor execution.

And when the oil reaches the actual shore, then you’ve got real, serious long-term trouble.

Second, and this is most telling – we have made practically no advances, no innovations, in containment and clean-up technologies for decades.  Her reasoning is compelling.  (By the way, Ms. Maddow is Stanford and Oxford Educated (Ph.D.), a Rhodes Scholar – she’s got a hefty mind and a very persuasive, case-building communication style).  She said that the oil companies, and the universities (with endowed teaching positions and funded research programs) have continually researched ways to innovate in the areas of finding oil sources and drilling for that oil.  It is the dollars invested in this research, this innovation, that enables us to now drill down nearly one mile to the ocean floor, and another 3-4 miles below the floor of the ocean, for oil.  Innovation has made this possible.

But the oil companies, the universities, have spent practically no money on research and development to innovate in the area of containment and clean-up.  In other words, we are using 21^st century technology for oil finding and oil drilling, and mid-20^th century technology in containment and clean-up.

This is a massive failure of innovation – and this failure is now a very expensive failure.

Her report serves as a business success and failure lesson.  Success requires innovation and execution. Failure in either leads to much bigger, very serious failure.  This is a reminder for all of us, regardless of our business.

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You can watch the “Busted Booms Fail Louisiana Coast” segment here:

View additional Maddow segments from Louisiana here: