

When Deviants Do Good - rmah
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/when-deviants-do-good

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kragen
Summary: 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
Or 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
Except 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
A 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
The 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.

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te_platt
From 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
> 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
Talking 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
I just meant that experienced parents would recognize, and try to stem, the
narcissistic potential of an idea that would encourage rebellion in their
children.

~~~
pekk
What defines "rebellion"?

~~~
lutusp
To many parents, rebellion means doing anything other than what the parents
instruct.

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michaelwww
This 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.

~~~
lutusp
> 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"

~~~
pcl
_"The Black Swan Strategy"_

But this really doesn't have anything to do with black swans... this technique
isn't about a rare and unpredictable occurrence, but rather with a deviation
from the norm.

 _"Community Natural Selection"_

Again, this doesn't map to their findings -- the community was _not_ selecting
the preferential strategy, even though it was present in the community.

"Positive deviation" would have been a less sensational way to put it, but
link-bait in and of itself isn't a bad thing, if the linked-to content
delivers. Which I think is the case here.

~~~
lutusp
> But this really doesn't have anything to do with black swans... this
> technique isn't about a rare and unpredictable occurrence ...

Sure it is -- that's why people didn't notice it until they were encouraged to
look at the behavior of the outliers -- those few examples whose children,
though poor, weren't malnourished.

> Again, this doesn't map to their findings -- the community was not selecting
> the preferential strategy, even though it was present in the community.

Umm, that's how "natural selection" is defined -- the rare behavior that
confers an advantage. All these people needed was encouragement to look for
the advantageous adaptation that was already present in the population.

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bluekite2000
For those who want to read more, Sternin wrote a book about it
[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7978844-the-power-of-
posi...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7978844-the-power-of-positive-
deviance)

