How well does your organisation work? I see, it’s like that, is it? The place relies on you and a handful of other highly motivated and extremely accomplished individuals to drive it along. Some of the rest do an OK job. Many are just unmotivated drones. And you’ve got nutters there too, have you? Yes, we know the sort you’re talking about. The strange guy in the corner who fiddles around all day with a computer program that nobody else understands. And the funny woman in that office at the end of the corridor who churns out reports that nobody reads. Can anyone explain the point of them?

But imagine if the unorthodox methods employed by these people were a more effective way of solving problems than you are using at the moment? What if the nutters were actually doing a better job than you?

Jerry Sternin calls these people positive deviants, and the process of bringing them in from the periphery of a group to improve the way it works is known as positive deviance. Sternin believes that positive deviants are everywhere. You just need to look for them. When you have found them, he believes, they can change your world.

It is unclear when the term positive deviance was coined but Sternin, a sprightly, white-haired former dean of Harvard Business School, has become the greatest evangelist for the idea that, it is said, can benefit every sort of group, from villages in the Third World to Wall Street investment banks. The Times caught up with him at the Saïd Business School in Oxford, where he was introducing his message to a British audience in a series of seminars.

Sternin began to explore the potential of “PD” when he was working as a director of the US arm of Save the Children. The story that he believes most clearly illustrates what PD is all about comes from his time working in Vietnam in the 1990s. Between 60 and 70 per cent of Vietnamese children under the age of 5 were malnourished. Sternin asked if any of the children from very poor families were well nourished. The surprising answer was yes, indicating that these families were doing something different from their peers. It transpired that the parents were collecting tiny shrimps and crabs from the rice fields and adding these, along with the greens from the tops of sweet potatoes, to the kids’ meals. This practice was contrary to the popular view in the community that these foods should not be given to children.

Sternin had found his positive deviants; individuals whose particular behaviour enables them to perform better than peers in the same environment and with the same resources. The challenge now was to persuade the rest of the community to follow the lead of the positive deviants and change their behaviour. This was done by inviting them to cook and eat with the mothers and children who were eating a better diet. The families began to adopt the better practices and by weighing the children at the beginning and end of a fixed period the parents were able to see an improvement in the health of their offspring.

By the end of a year more than 1,000 children had undertaken the nutrition sessions and 90 per cent had been lifted out of malnutrition. The model was copied throughout Vietnam and was picked up in other countries. Sternin claims that the nutrition programme has been replicated in some 25 countries.

He went on to use positive deviance in numerous environments, from villages in Egypt where only a handful of women were not circumcised to hospitals battling with MRSA. Corporations such as Goldman Sachs and Merck have started to dabble in PD.

As long as human beings have been living in communities, individuals have found ways of doing things differently from the rest of the pack and often those methods are eventually appreciated by the common herd and become the norm. But that is a haphazard process. Positive deviance is about focusing on the problem like a laser and then finding a solution from the edge of your vision.

To an outsider who has not been a manager of anything since bringing chaos to a student newspaper editor’s office, it is easy to view positive deviance as common sense. Of course we should be using people who are doing things well wherever they are in an organisation. “PD is un-common sense,” counters Sternin. In reality the norm is for organisations to be driven from the top down in a rigid management structure that does not easily allow for those on the fringes who are doing excellent work to be spotted and appreciated.

The received wisdom when looking at making changes is to examine best practice elsewhere. But the problem with employing best practice, says Sternin, is that this means importing a new way of doing things from the outside. This is fine if you are trying to solve a technical issue but if you are hoping to effect a social or behavioural change it is better to rely on the community to find the solution within itself.

He uses the analogy of organ transplants: the foreign body is often rejected by the new host. Similarly, a workforce that is told to adopt a new way of working is immediately suspicious because the implicit message is that somebody else is doing this better than you.

The trick, says Sternin, is deftly to give those who need to change “ownership” of the process so that they are motivated and enthusiastic about what is happening. “Ownership is the key,” he says. This is what he did with the families of malnourished children in Vietnam. He saw himself as a facilitator who ensured that the better way of feeding children was demonstrated to families by other families, not by him.