Smash hit

Sternin calls this process “make the group the guru”. He tells of a Save the Children project in Mali in which malnutrition among the children of a village was attributed to a sorcerer putting spells on them. But a few children were rarely sick. Inquiries revealed that the parents of these children were giving them extra snacks, the families were washing their hands and the fathers were involved in mealtimes. As these parents, the positive deviants, began sharing their simple method of domestic organisation, malnutrition in the village eased. “We have vanquished the sorceror,” said one grandmother. Sternin believes that in companies in the developed world the workforce are too ready to follow the lead of the sorcerer in the boss’s office and place blame for problems and responsibility for fixing them on the sorcerer’s head.

Positive deviance has started to appear in the corporate world. Grey Warner, head of the Latin American division of Merck, the pharmaceutical giant, started experimenting with PD in Mexico a couple of years ago after talking to Sternin. Sales of an osteoporosis drug were flat but Warner made inquiries as to how a few salespeople were performing well. He discovered that they were “working hard to have a relationship with doctors” rather than chasing as many sales as possible. They spent time explaining the science of the drug and which patients would most benefit from it.

The successful salesmen were encouraged to explain their methods to their peers. “The reps now engage with one another. It’s a more bottom-up kind of approach,” he says. This was a “subtle but profound difference. My experience is that if you actively engage the people that are doing the work in defining how they do it — they have ownership of it — you get better results. In the case of the performance of this product we saw improvement.” This idea of the community handling its own change is appealing to all those whose hackles are raised by the arrival of clipboard-carrying management consultants in their offices.

“When people get together socially in England, at some stage someone is bound to talk about the consultants that their organisation has brought in, who claim to have found the holy grail and are trying to fit everyone into the same shaped vessel,” says Penny Soper, a communications executive at Hertfordshire County Council who attended one of Sternin’s seminars. “Positive deviance was one of the most stimulating, commonsense ideas that I have come across in years.”

But don’t think that PD will necessarily free you from the consultants’ clutches. This seminar was hosted by Jane Lewis, herself a management consultant who hopes to use PD on future projects.

A doubt harboured by some of those at the Oxford seminar was that it would be difficult to persuade people of the worth of PD. It is all very well evolving through PD in life and death situations, where there is no issue about people lacking motivation to improve their lot. But in an office environment the motivation to change entrenched behaviours can be sorely lacking.

“The people who are not working well do not wish to change. There’s no incentive to improve,” said one seminar delegate. “Why should they bother? That’s probably true of 50 per cent of employees.”

Others said that they are under constant pressure to reduce costs and do not have the time for the lateral thinking that trying positive deviance involves. Sternin’s response: “If you are looking for sustained change you can’t afford the time not to do it. If you want sustained change without police monitoring, this is the way to do it.”

He admits that there are not positive deviants in every organisation or group. And if they are not there, then attempts to solve a problem through positive deviance cannot be made. PD is not the answer to all problems. It is a tool for addressing seemingly intractable problems.”

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to positive deviance being adopted by many organisations is that it requires leaders to cede power. Sternin says that leaders must become followers, setting aside their egos and being prepared to “relinquish to their community the job of chief discoverer”.

David Bolchover, a writer on management, is sceptical of how PD would work in practice because it relies on those in power loosening their grip. “Do big organisations reward conformity? I think so. I don’t think they reward people who go against the grain.”

If chief executives who are paid huge salaries to come up with answers were to pursue PD, says Bolchover, they would be questioning “the point of their own existence. Certainly they would be questioning their market worth.” At a time when CEOs are earning many times what most of their employees earn they are unlikely to adopt systems that assume that others have the answers. “If you go around saying people at the bottom have these abilities, why would there be great differentials in salaries?”