The importance of positive deviance

15th October 2018

In 1991 Jerry and Monique Sternin had six months to fix the problem of child malnutrition in Vietnam.

If you’d asked big-name consultants to do it, they might have produced a 12,000-page report on changing agriculture, transport, education and market systems. Fix the country, in other words. Nobody would read it, and it would be impossible.

The Sternins had a different approach. They went to the most impoverished villages, found the least-starving kids, and watched what their families were doing.

What they discovered was that, as well as rice, these families were feeding their kids tiny shrimps, snails and crabs, and the greens of sweet potatoes, all available in the fields but not considered the “done thing”.

Having discovered these “positive deviants” (a term coined by Marian Zeitlin), the Sternins recruited locals to teach others in the village. Children’s health improved and the programme was eventually rolled out across the country.

The Sternins didn’t ask, “What’s the problem and how can we fix it?”

Instead, they asked, “What’s working and how can we do more of it?”

That’s what you need to empower your delegatee to ask.