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Whilst doing some research on what is going on in the world of positive deviance, we were really delighted to find that some of our blog posts have been reproduced on the website of the Positive Deviance Resource Centre, Faculty of Public Health of the University of Indonesia. Positive deviance is extensively used across Indonesia. It seems that most current projects are nutrition and health-related, but it has been used there topics as diverse as girl trafficking, and improving the health of sex workers.
Attended another great meeting of the Change Leaders, the alumni group of the Coaching and Consulting for Change programme of Oxford University and HEC Paris. The group is growing, cohort by cohort, and we are getting world-leading speakers. In this case, we had the privilege of Margaret Wheatley‘s presence for a whole day, in which she updated us on her latest thinking about complexity. There were many themes which resonate with positive deviance – start small and work up, changing what you do will change how the bigger system is. If you go with the flow of life, and what works, life becomes easier. Other concepts inherent in PD – letting go, self-organising, not asking why – help to work with uncertainty and complexity too.
There was a pecha-kucha event (quick presentation with a 20-slide powerpoint backdrop, which must have no words on it and must scroll every 20 seconds) in which I told the story of speed PD and messy play, which went down very well – see our case study and blog feature about the NCSL workshop.
Photo by courtesy of Cécile Demailly under creative commons attribution license. 
A recent article by Eleanor Mill’s in The Sunday Times, ‘Done heroin, had a kid, now she’s hooked on finding a job’ made an incredibly inspirational read. A lady named Jane, who grew up in a family that has depended on benefits for generations, and who found herself spending a decade on heroin ‘just existing,’ is in the process of turning her life around for the better.
After losing custody of her little girl, Jane attended a 11-week parenting course and is now focussed on getting her daughter back full-time, as well as getting a job. This story is proof that people have the internal ability and wisdom to change their own lives for the better, when given the right encouragement and resources.
The article outlines Cheryl Milner’s views, who with 4Children in Wiltshire is pioneering a scheme to get young mothers into work. She rightly says that “the trick is not just to get people into work but to give them the confidence, tools and skills to stay there.”
This is a crucial point. I was trained by Jerry Sternin the founder of Positive Deviance, which takes this very same philosophy and sees astounding results. Positive Deviance is based on the premise that people and communities have the wisdom to create change for the better, but that these hidden wisdoms need uncovering and that all community members need to be given a voice. It also encourages community members to develop new skills as the community – not professionals – lead the project, conducting data collection and listening exercises among other skills. In our projects with the Home Office we have seen people change in front of us. It is an incredibly powerful thing to watch.
This article shows that seeing people as people first and not as victims or statistics is the most important thing society can do for them. Giving them a voice and hope is integral to resolving many problems within communities, even those of the most intractable nature.
Our work in Cambridgeshire features in the Guardian’s public leaders networks blog. Simon Kerss, the Cambridgeshire Domestic Abuse Partnership Manager, speaks about his experience of working with PD to “devictimise” survivors of domestic abuse.
PD provides a powerful way of changing relationships and empowering community members to take action and build confidence. In turn, this helps to redesign services to ensure support and resources are focused on the areas of greatest risk and need, giving community members a voice about what works for them.
We’ve had a busy couple of weeks with workshops. Sue Ritchie, of MutualGain, and Jane Lewis ran an introduction to using positive deviance for behaviour change for a group of officers and members in Cambridgeshire. This was provided under the auspices of the NESTA Creative Councils initiative, and Involve, the leading community engagement consultancy.
The intention was to act as a kind of “thought-provoker” to help the group think differently about getting people in rural areas to change their mind about what effective travel provision for non-drivers would look like.
The NHS Institute is leading the use of innovative approaches to improving patient care across the NHS, including initiatives such as the Productive Ward, the Productive Theature and Experience Based Patient Care. Helen Bevan, their Executive Director of Innovation, has taken an interest in Positive Deviance and attended our Practice Research Workshop at Said Business School in 2010, and then Jane Lewis’s presentation at the European Organisation Design Forum in Frankfurt last October. She invited Jane to do a similar presentation to her staff at the Institute, to raise awareness of approach and start a wider discussion of how Positive Deviance can enhance their current offering. T
The webinar with Involve and Sue Ritchie of MutualGain received a warm welcome from participants – “great, really inspiring webinar” was one comment in the “chat” box. You can see the tweets, listen to a recording and view the slides on the Involve blog by following this link: http://www.involve.org.uk/webinar-positively-deviant/ . Jane Lewis and Sue Ritchie presented the fundamentals of positive deviance and how it works to deliver behaviour change in the community.
Tweets include:
“I like the key concepts of positive deviance – ownership not buy in, the group is the guru”
“I really like #positivedeviance and its view of citizens as ‘the guru’ -very powerful & empowering. #CreativeCouncils webinar”
We’re delighted to be working with Sue Ritchie of MutualGain again, this time on a webinar for Involve, the community engagement specialists. Called “Positively Deviant”, it explains what positive deviance is and how it has delivered exceptional results in solving intractable community problems. We will be talking about why it is different from other community engagagement and empowerment models and how it works, using UK examples. You can sign up to this webinar by going to our events page and following the links or by e-mailing Tim Hughes at tim@involve.org.uk. The webinar is sponsored by the NESTA Creative Councils programme and is free.
Southwark Council are kindly hosting a workshop for us on 27th March 2012.
Featuring speakers from recent UK positive deviance exercises in Cambridge and Peckham, this workshop shows how PD works, and optimises the social value of funds invested in it, to:
We show how this can be achieved without expensive resources and with limited facilities. We look at the problems it can be used to solve and how it compares with other approaches to community engagement and empowerment. We also introduce a new strategy for recruiting local facilitators and scaling up, building momentum, expertise and enthusiasm in a sustainable and economical way.
You can learn more and book directly on-line using Eventbrite, using this button:
Download the workshop overview and details here:
download pdf file
Terms and conditions of booking can be downloaded here: download pdf file
The report on the Home Office pilot project is to be presented to the Home Secretary and other Home Office ministers, before being placed on the Home Office’s new best practice website. We’ve had very positive feedback on the report itself and on the project – “a very good report that gives a really clear picture of what was achieved”, and “the project delivered positive outcomes – a good story to tell”. Key outcomes are the “devictimisation” of survivors of domestic violence in Cambridgeshire, which enables them to put their lives together again, and the outreach achieved by PD projects in Southwark and Wales. In one of the pilots, Blaenau Gwent Domestic Abuse Services used PD behaviours to reach out to nearly 200 people and enable some of them to open up for the first time. In the area, reports of abuse to women went up by 15% in the period of the pilot, which is seen as positive, as it can take up to 35 instances of abuse before it is reported.
Once we have final approval, the report will be published on our website too.
On Tuesday 10th January, the whole Woodward Lewis team was joined by Dr Keith Ruddle, associate fellow of both Said Business School and Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. Keith has kindly agreed to be a member of our advisory panel. Together, we worked through what we have learned during 2011, especially from the Home Office project and a strategy for helping our clients get the most from Positive Deviance by scaling up from a single project to a wider, more cohesive approach. Elements will include programme planning and management, facilitator training and accreditation and experiential learning combined with local faciltator recruitment.