Unlocking Lasting Change: The Power of Positive Deviants

Why Change Efforts Often Fail

Some business problems—lackluster performance, escalating costs, interdepartmental conflict—persist no matter how hard companies try to fix them. Why? Most leaders impose top-down change tactics—importing outside experts or “best” practices, which never generate the grassroots enthusiasm essential to drive enduring transformation.

The Alternative: Identifying Positive Deviants

How to fire up that enthusiasm? Help struggling groups identify your organization’s positive deviants: people who are already doing things in radically different—and better—ways. Positive deviants might consist of a small cadre of engineers tackling a thorny technical problem, or a sales team scoring unusual successes with customers.

Make These Deviants Evangelists of Their Own Innovative Practices

Make these deviants evangelists of their own innovative practices. Identify them as the go-to guys—the problem solvers who have the answers. Resist any urge to co-opt their practices and impose them yourself on struggling groups.

The Power of Change from Within

Change from within—discovered, celebrated, and implemented by the people who need to do the changing—is a surefire way to bring isolated success strategies into your company’s mainstream. Goldman Sachs’s Private Wealth Management unit discovered this when it encouraged top-performing investment teams to share their practices across the unit. Result? Doubling of average productivity per team.

Leveraging Positive Deviants’ Talents

Make the Group the Guru

Facilitate the search for positive deviants, but let struggling groups own the quest for change.

Example: At Hewlett-Packard, a research division program exposed some engineers to the concept of positive deviance. Inspired, one engineer decided to tackle a persistent problem: computer failures due to overheating. He identified people scattered about HP’s global engineering fraternity who had independently dabbled in the problem and had developed prototypes. His inquiry galvanized 100 engineers to collaborate on the problem, resulting in more reliable machines that saved millions for HP.

Reframe Problems through Facts

Avoid conventional assumptions about problems’ causes and solutions. Instead, use hard data to identify the root causes of positive deviance.

Example: Billy Beane, new manager of the struggling Oakland A’s, could have badgered the team’s owners for more recruiting dollars—had he assumed that winning teams require heavy spending on superstars. Instead, he mined baseball’s near-inexhaustible vein of statistics to identify factors—such as on-base percentage—most correlated with winning games. He bypassed high-priced celebrity players for less well-known players who nevertheless embodied winning statistics—transforming the A’s into a frequent title contender despite a meager budget.

Make it Safe to Learn

Positive deviants may fear being attacked if their influence challenges others’ status. Make them feel safe discussing taboos and exploring alternative solutions.

Example: Some companies use “organizational CAT scans” to surface “undiscussable” issues. For example, at a one-day workshop, key stakeholders critical to change read anonymous quotes from one another describing the company’s problems. Subgroups then delve into the issues and generate change strategies.

Make the Problem Concrete

Expose uncomfortable truths in compelling ways.

Example: In a workshop devoted to curtailing HIV in the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar, prostitutes claimed they made clients use condoms. But when facilitators asked them to apply a condom to a banana, degrees of dexterity differentiated pretenders from practitioners. The practitioners shared their strategies for persuading clients to use condoms, enabling their colleagues to overcome their clients’ objections.

Confound Resistance to Change

New approaches to problems are often rejected by an organization. To circumvent your company’s “immune system response,” introduce new practices into the mainstream gradually and collaboratively.

Example: Influential investment professionals in Goldman Sachs’s Private Wealth Management unit identified positive deviant practices among PWM’s most successful investment teams. Squads comprising informal leaders from offices nationwide rolled out templates to help investment teams adopt the practices, and the squads explained why and how the practices worked. The tactic generated buzz throughout the unit and a high adoption rate.

Conclusion

By identifying and empowering positive deviants, organizations can unlock lasting change and create a culture of innovation and improvement. By making these individuals evangelists of their own innovative practices, companies can drive transformation from within, rather than imposing change from the top down.

FAQs

• What are positive deviants?
  Positive deviants are individuals or groups within an organization who are already doing things in radically different—and better—ways.
• How do you identify positive deviants?
  Identify them through observation, interviews, or surveys.
• What is the key to successful change?
  Change from within—discovered, celebrated, and implemented by the people who need to do the changing.