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 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
• Identifying time savings of between 5% and 30% of a day for social workers in Hertfordshire
• Improving infant nutrition in 44 countries between 30% and 50%.
• 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.
• Reducing smoking by 20% in New South Wales prisons

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 provide:

• Open taster and practitioner training
• Training and mentoring of in-house PD facilitators
• Facilitation of PD projects.

More information

Positive Deviance Initiative website

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