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When Deviants Do Good
- te_platt 14y agoFrom the article: “The essence of development is to help people build capacity to do things themselves,” That is one of the most fundamentally Moral statements I have ever seen. Try replacing "development" with education. Or even better replace "development" with "raising your children".
- lutusp 14y ago> That is one of the most fundamentally Moral statements I have ever seen. Try replacing "development" with education. Or even better replace "development" with "raising your children". The essence of the positive deviance idea is to let the children raise themselves by abandoning the methods of their parents (of tradition) and instead monitoring the best practices of their peers, but I suspect parents would (with some justice) object to this interpretation.
- nwhitehead 14y agoTalking to your children in an honest way as independent people, working with them to come up with innovative solutions to problems, being inspired by their peers who have managed to overcome the same problem (the deviants) sounds like an EXCELLENT idea. I don't object at all.
- lutusp 14y agoI just meant that experienced parents would recognize, and try to stem, the narcissistic potential of an idea that would encourage rebellion in their children.
- kragen 14y agoSummary: in many cases it's more effective to promote the spread of existing indigenous innovation than to try to introduce innovation from outside. Or, to look at it another way, the bottleneck is often not invention, but diffusion.
- nathanstitt 14y agoOr that existing members of a community have more influence on the community in question than outsiders do. Shocking no? I think anyone who's ever done any kind of training or system implementation figures this out very quickly. The first step is always find the influencers and get them on your side. After that it's a piece of cake.
- saturdaysaint 14y agoExcept this story wasn't about finding the influencers - if the healthier families were influential, there wouldn't have been much need for the outside intervention. To take your analogy, this would be more like modeling your system around the most successful practices at your implementation site as opposed to designing a system and forcing compliance.
- nathanstitt 14y agoA good point. I think you're correct in what the article's focus is and I way oversimplified what it actually does. To take the reasoning a bit further - what the program is really doing is finding examples of the behavior they want to encourage, then turning the practitioners of that behavior into influencers. Which is an altogether different thing than what I'd outlined. And also far trickier I'd imagine.
- kragen 14y agoThe article describes neither finding examples of a behavior they want to encourage, nor turning anyone into influencers. First, they start with a desired result they want to encourage, and then seek out what behaviors are currently leading to that result. Second, the approach to diffusing those behaviors described is not simply raising the influence of the people practicing them, and may or may not have that effect at all. I recommend that you read the article with an eye to what it says instead of what you expected it would say before you started reading it.
- michaelwww 14y agoThis is an excellent article about and excellent idea. The use of the word deviant is unfortunate. I understand now they mean deviation from the mean. "Positive Deviance Initiative" sounds like a program for HIV+ sex offenders.
- hammock 14y agoReally, the author is not stretching the meaning of the word deviant. It has always meant deviating from an accepted norm, and it means the same in this context. The social norm was to feed your kid rice 2x per day- the social deviants were the ones feeding their kids more often and animal proteins/greens. They were abnormal. The difference is we are used to hearing negative examples of deviance (crime, etc) when there are plenty of positive ones. Deviance (a relative concept) is not the same as perversion (a moral concept).
- lutusp 14y ago> the author is not stretching the meaning of the word deviant. True, but most words have two meanings -- a formal one, and an emotional one. In this case, it seems the emotional meaning was overlooked. > Deviance (a relative concept) is not the same as perversion (a moral concept). But "deviance" is often used in a moral context -- consider the expression "deviant behavior". Just to make the point, the word "perversion" could be used in a neutral context, but only if its emotion baggage could be overlooked. Ironically, one can say "standard deviation" in statistics without anyone taking it the wrong way -- it seems completely neutral when used that way. Anyway, I wish they has asked me -- i would have told them to call it "The Black Swan Strategy."
- nsxwolf 14y agoThe title of the article deliberately played up the "perversion" angle, though.
- lutusp 14y ago> The use of the word deviant is unfortunate. I agree -- it's very unfortunate. Typically, words have a formal meaning, and an emotional one. This word's emotional meaning was unfortunately ignored. Then, try to to repair the damage, they came up with "positive deviance", which only serves to highlight the error. And to think, any number of better alternatives exist: "The Black Swan Strategy" "Community Natural Selection" "The Self-rescue Plan" And my favorite: "Science"
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- bluekite2000 14y agoFor those who want to read more, Sternin wrote a book about it http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7978844-the-power-of-positive-deviance http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7978844-the-power-of-posi...