Positive Deviance (PD) has grown from its roots in nutrition and community development, and has demonstrated its worth as a way of creating dramatic, sustainable change within existing resources, and short timescales. The approach is best suited to long-standing behavioural issues where you need to get beyond “the usual suspects” to reach those who resist change.
Examples of community PD applications include:
- Reducing MRSA in a group of US hospitals by 62% through changing the behaviour of all staff in all parts of each hospital within six months per hospital over a two-year period.
- Improving infant nutrition in 44 countries by between 30% and 50% in each community project.
- Addressing teenage violence and gun crime in a deprived community in Pennsylvania through interactions with teenagers, parents and teachers – and reducing lateness, a precursor to violence, by 50%.
Some examples of organisational PD are:
- Identifying time savings of between 5% and 30% of a day for social workers in Hertfordshire
- Improving sales performance in a pharmaceutical company so that target achievement improved for a specific drug from 15 out of 21 areas to 21 out of 21 areas.
- Improving relationships and reducing aggression between warders and inmates in the Danish Prison Service
PD is based on the premise that in any community or team, there are exceptional individuals who have already found solutions to chronic problems within existing resources. Getting the community itself to identify current norms, find the positive deviants and facilitate others to copy their behaviour delivers quick wins and frees up time to look at underlying causes. It’s not a case of best practice as some solutions may be pragmatic and not in line with current procedures, whereas in other cases, the discovery process in PD gives people a sense of ownership, and they deliver in line with processes they had previously resisted.
Our team offers the greatest depth of PD experience in the UK, and close links with the Positive Deviance Initiative at Tufts University in Boston, Massachussetts. We have successfully delivered organisational projects in Adult Care Services, and are working community projects in Gosport and Havant relating to young parenthood, boys’ attainment and community safety.
Click here to visit the Positive Deviance Initiative website
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