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Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has invited Jane to give two presentations about positive deviance and Woodward Lewis’s new Hidden Insights® programme. The first one took place at their in-house training centre, Lawress Hall, to leaders in their Estates and Support Services Department, who proved to be a very engaged, thoughtful and amusing group to work with. Feedback was that they very much appreciated the new and different perspective that positive deviance brought to their current challenges.
Jane has also been invited to speak at HMRC’s regular master-classes on change. Other speakers have included luminaries such as Will Hutton and Dr Karen Stephenson. Incidentally, Karen is an expert on social network analysis and this method is a great way of assessing the impact of Hidden Insights® and positive deviance on improving working relationships. Karen and Jane hope to work together in the future.
Jane’s HMRC session is on 17th October 2013 and is open to HMRC and other central government senior change leaders and agents. The theme is likely to be around what positive deviance and the Hidden Insights® 12-week programme can offer in the areas of behaviour change in both organisations and the community, and how it is particularly relevant in times of austerity.
After trialling with a range of clients, Woodward Lewis LLP has launched their Hidden Insights® programme. Taking on board concerns about the name “positive deviance”, but ensuring that all the best of this approach is built in, this is a great way of creating culture and behaviour change.
This means that all the pluses of positive deviance – successful, engaging change within limited resources – are now offered in an easy-to-understand package. Hidden Insights® is an innovative, inspiring and creative method of organisational and community development that leads directly to action, not just plans or recommendations.
We offer a three-day facilitator training programme. This leads straight into a project where participants are coached and mentored in their own organisations, to learn by experience, and to deliver solutions to real work and/or community problems. The project phase lasts about 12 weeks and is supported with action learning sets. The trained facilitators can then use their new skills on collaborative projects and programmes. In-house and individual programmes are available, and are ideal for people at all levels, as well as change practitioners and organisation development specialists. Community versions can be run to train up community development specialists and volunteers.
Find out more about Hidden Insights® by clicking on this link.
Thanks to an introduction by Dr Keith Ruddle, of Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, we were delighted to be invited to run a half-day workshop with key directors and senior managers from the Department of Health, at their training centre in Waterloo.
Working with Keith, we facilitated an exploration of positive deviance in both healthcare and also in the context of transformational change in the Department of Health. Keith outlined how new leadership styles were needed in such a complex environment and we showed how positive deviance can be used to leverage local knowledge, spread effective practice and build collaboration and inclusion. We had a positive response – one of the Directors-General recognised PD as “reverse consultancy” and that it builds “communities of collaboration. A summary of the presentation is set out in the DH board paper.
Simon Kerss, the Domestic Abuse Partnership Manager for Cambridgeshire, talks to Jane Lewis about his experience of being part of the Home Office positive deviance community coaching project, and what it achieved.
Great video on complexity from the RSA – recommended!
Great video on complexity from the RSA:
For the first time, representatives of nearly all the UK users of positive deviance met together in Westminster for a round-table debate on the value of positive deviance, and learning points from the exercises so far to carry forward into future projects.
The team included Home Office representatives, John Chadwick and Sara Featherstone, Graeme Gordon, Director of Corporate Strategy of Southwark Council, Simon Kerss, Domestic Abuse Partnership Manager from Cambridgeshire County Council, and Ian Lycett, Chief Executive of Gosport Borough Council. They were joined by Steve Johnson, former Chief Executive of Capital Ambition and strategic consultant; Sally Hammond, Associate Director of Policy, Analysis and Research at the Audit Commission, and Esmee Wilcox, Senior Manager for Policy and Implementation at Suffolk County Council. Sadly Steve Broome, Director of Research at the RSA, had a medical emergency and was unable to attend at the last minute.
The team concluded that positive deviance delivers benefits at each stage. It is particularly powerful in helping to bring communities together and to help build empowered teams of “unusual suspects”, such as teen parents and survivors of domestic abuse.
Simon Kerss observed that working on PD projects helped survivors of domestic abuse realise that they had value and personal power – it helped them to move on much more quickly than other methods that the partnership had used. It had completely changed the way the Police dealt with victims and in communications intended to reach out to people in abusive relationships.
Ian Lycett said that the team of young parents who had bonded, then actively worked to get into schools in Gosport to spread the message of what being a young parent meant in reality, had really impressed colleagues and councillors. He also had met Jez Edwards, the mum who helped us create “speed PD” and thought this had real potential to address parenting issues in a safe and adaptable way. He was particularly interested in the fact that it could create community networks that would in some way replace the support that historically would have been provided by extended families.
The Home Office had seen benefits from each of the three pilots, again in bringing in “unusual suspects” and in creating activities that were truly by and for the community. This was endorsed recently by a Home Office peer review team who visited Bishop Creswell Green’s group in Southwark.
The group discussed differences and similarities between PD and other methods of community engagement and empowerment and agreed that although it was difficult to explain in a few words, it did deliver social value in engaging volunteers, reducing dependency and moving people into work and education. Rather than being a programme, like Connected Care, or a process, like Service Co-Design, it was a technique that shared affinities with Appreciative Enquiry, positive psychology and strengths-based lean. It differs, though, from each of these in various ways. Primarily by being very practical and versatile, by being evidence-based, and by focusing on what is hidden but already working, it could add a lot of value to service improvement exercises in leading to quick wins with relatively low resource requirements.
The group noted the paradox between the fact that PD is a methodology that can really help communities to build skills and support each other, reducing demand for services in the longer term, but yet the funding does not seem to be available for prevention-based approaches. The exception might be the Troubled Families Initiative (TFI), where it was agreed that PD could add very useful perspectives and practical community help.
We are working with two Councils, one in London and one outside, to explore the opportunities PD creates to add value to proposed TFI programmes.
We plan to use PD both to create supporting networks in the community for the families and their neighbours, and also to look at the practices that truly work across the range of agencies that are involved. PD will be one key method amongst several, to look at evidence-based development of what works, allow appreciation between agencies of the range of potential interventions and their value in various situations, and to improve communication and reduce duplication. This approach will be tied back to both the key metrics of the TFI itself and also the metrics of the key organisations involved (we’ve counted 40 in the London project so far!).
PD has created a small and select group of users, community members and fans so far – thanks to all of them for their support and encouragement!
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.