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:

• De-victimise vulnerable people and put them on a path forward
• Raise community awareness of issues and ignite positive action
• Give people confidence and hope, and enable them to sustain new behaviours

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

Once we have final approval, the report will be published on our website too.

Its organiser, Shanti Waas of Hampshire Fire and Rescue Services, had learned about PD at an LGID conference last year.  Our session was about positive deviance and how it works well as an inclusive approach to solving difficult community problems.  Sue explained her expertise in community engagement and what had attracted her to PD.  She talked about common problems with community engagement and why she raised PD’s profile at the Home Office as a solution to these.  This led to the national pilots being set up.

Jane took over 30 participants through a workshop to show how it has worked in Southwark to create a cohesive and diverse community group which is finding examples of young people who do not join gangs and investigating what they do, so that existing successful coping strategies, already working in Peckham for some families, can be learned and practised more widely.  PD’s use for inclusive problem solving in organisations and for parenting issues were also discussed.

As well as being a very interesting conference, it was a warm and welcoming event, with an interesting cultural evening on the Thursday evening.

Jane’s presentation covered how Positive Deviance has been used in organisations to uncover hidden solutions and hidden wisdom.  Problems can be solved within existing resources.  The question was posed – “how can we design organisations that allow this kind of empowerment to happen?”  There was a lot of knowledge and expertise in the room and this led to many stimulating discussions,  and ideas about potential applications, both in organisations and communities.

Jane with Stuart Wigham (Aston University and Birmingham City Council), Professor Andrew Campbell (Ashridge Strategic Management Centre) and Wulf Schoenberg (Deutsche Telekom AG)

Thanks to our new team member and Gosport mum Jez Edwards for running a great session on her work with Little Waves Children’s Centre in Gosport.  Jez took the PD steps, turned them into four weekly sessions, and helped a group of eight mums to discover ways of being more engaged parents and playing actively with their young children.  In doing this, the mums found their own way of meeting the Government’s 5-a-day parenting guidelines without experts telling them anything!  Feedback from the mums was outstanding and we hope to run more sessions – the mums really enjoyed being facilitated by someone just like them, and this helped them to relax and become more confident.  Each mum brought ideas and something that they were good at, to get over their concerns about messy play, a particular favourite with young boys.

You can find a fuller report here:  download pdf file with pictures of the final play session.

Jane Lewis with some of the participants at the NCSL workshop.  We had very positive feedback overall, and active interest from several delegates.

Jane Lewis and some NCSL delegates

Positive Deviance has been used globally to solve education issues. Four inner state schools in New Jersey, USA are using it to improve student achievement and other intractable issues.  Save the Children is running a PD programme to increase the number of girls attending school in the Afar region of Ethiopia and there has been a marked increase in girl’s enrolment since the programme began.

Woodward Lewis worked with Little Waves Children’s Centre in Gosport,Hampshire to tackle the problem of low children’s attainment in the area.  Little Waves wanted to address this, putting the emphasis on parents as first educators, so Positive Deviance – which places the community at the heart of the process – was a perfect fit with its objectives.

The Centre hosted a pilot positive deviance community coaching exercise, which saw a group of parents come together and learn from each other on how to best deal with their child’s learning and development. Creating change from within the community fits with the Government’s big society agenda, while encouraging and motivating parents through peer groups. The group agreed that messy play, with parents and primary care-givers, was essential to child attainment and they learned from each other to create a practical messy play session.  No experts told them how to do it.  They ran a very successful play session together.  This has given them the confidence to try this themselves at home, and they all want to do more PD work.   All parents have the power and knowledge to turn around their child’s attainment; they just need to be given the confidence and motivation from drawing on internal wisdom. This is extremely quick, efficient and does not require huge monetary investment.

During the conference, Woodward Lewis covered the global examples and Jez Edwards, the community coach for the Little Waves project, a mum recruited from the Little Waves parents, discussed the process in detail. A graphic illustrator was on hand to provide images throughout and below are some of the drawings.

The workshop was a great success, with very positive feedback, and has led to several meetings to discuss taking the Positive Deviance process further within various Children’s Services bodies.

Our thanks go to the NCSL and Deloittes for inviting us.

Graphic recording from NCSL Positive Deviance presentation

Jane will be joining speakers Professor George Romme, Professor of Entrepreneurship & Innovation and Dean of Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and Professor Andrew Campbell, the Director of the Ashridge Strategic Management Centre.

Comments include:  “valuing the journey as much as the end result”;  “it celebrates our communities making a difference rather than where we have gone wrong”;  “it builds a support network and friendships”;  “We’ve moved from being service users to service providers”;  “we don’t have to be experts to make a difference”.

We will be posting the actual scanned feedback in our resources section, and a photo of the group shortly.

All three groups are seeking funding to extend and expand the work they are doing.

Our thoughts are set out in today’s post in the influential politics.co.uk blog. Click on this link to see the full article,”Those who didn’t riot tell us more than those who did”.