Jerry Sternin had six months to solve child malnutrition in Vietnam. Impossible. But some children weren’t malnourished. Their mothers, he said, were ‘positive deviants’.

Change from the inside

It probably comes as no surprise that I’m somewhat sceptical about transformation programs and change management. I’m certainly for genuine transformations of hearts and minds that help others flourish. But I’ve rarely seen a program deliver such changes. Change management only seems to manage changes in compliance.

“You can’t bring permanent solutions from outside.” Jerry Sternin

At a formative stage in my own practice I discovered the story of Jerry Sternin and his advocacy of ‘positive deviants’. His own theory built on Marian Zeitlin’s work on preventing childhood malnutrition. The conventional change model was to fix problems with outside solutions. But Zeitlin asked: Why did some children always do better? How could we amplify what their parents were doing? The answer was ‘Positive Deviance’. http://www.fastcompany.com/42075/positive-deviant

Sternin knew the problem firsthand: ‘The traditional model for social and organizational change doesn’t work. It never has. You can’t bring permanent solutions in from outside … We call conventional wisdom about malnutrition “true but useless”, or “TBU”’.

In the 1990s almost half the children of Vietnam were malnourished. After inviting Save the Children to help, the Vietnamese government then directed Jerry and Monique Sternin to achieve dramatic change in six months and leave. Sternin was ‘certain that the only way to come up with a plan to fight malnutrition was to discover it within the Vietnamese village culture itself’.

Most change programs advise building a team from across the whole system. Sternin calls it the ‘dinner party’ approach: making sure everyone is on the guest list. That has (some) value when trying to change an entire social system. But working within a community, people need to identify with the same challenges and resources constraints.

Working with local Save the Children staff, they enlisted mothers to ‘identify the positive deviants within their villages — the mothers whose children were not malnourished’. We might think the process from here is easy: identify the deviant practices and teach them. But the mothers with well-nourished children were deviants not heroes.

Break with convention

I’ll let Sternin finish the story:

Conventional wisdom said no to eating certain kinds of nutritious foods … The positive deviants were going to rice paddies and collecting tiny shrimps and crabs to mix with the rice … (and) sweet-potato greens … low-class food — and mixed them with the rice. They were supplementing the carbohydrates with protein and vitamins. And positive deviants displayed all kinds of caring behaviors … They fed children who had diarrhea, for example, even though conventional wisdom said no to this.

Once you find deviant behaviors, don’t tell people about them. It’s not a transfer of knowledge. It’s not about importing best practices from somewhere else … You enable people to practice a new behavior, not to sit in a class learning about it … Let other groups develop their own curiosity … Chip away at conventional wisdom, and (show) in indisputable terms, the results that come with doing things differently.

The results were dramatic. Malnutrition dropped 65 per cent to 85 per cent in two years. A Harvard School of Public Health study showed that children born after the first changes experienced the same enhanced nutrition. ‘The program reached 2.2 million Vietnamese people in 265 villages. Our living university has become a national model for teaching villagers to reduce drastically malnutrition in Vietnam’.

Jerry Sternin’s 7 step guide to change

1. Don’t presume you have the answer.
2. Let them do it themselves.
3. Identify conventional wisdom.
4. Identify and analyze the deviants.
5. Let deviants adopt their own deviations.
6. Track results and publicise them.
7. Repeat Steps 1 through 6.

And a few more things worth keeping in mind

1. Recognise the wisdom in others.
2. Read patterns, not formulas.
3. Deepen attentiveness and presence.
4. Expect brilliance in the anomalous.
5. Follow as well as you lead.
6. Choose relational over abstract.
7. Find grounded questions.
8. Subvert elitism.
9. Subvert unhelpful abstraction.
10. Renew core conversations.
11. Know that meaning always unfolds.
12. Find stories of identity and purpose.
13. Expect brilliance in the unlikely.
14. Help others name their brilliance.
15. Honour craft and community.
16. Commit to others before outcomes.
17. Choose words that build community.

Where do you see conventional wisdom about ‘change’ stopping real change?

Where do you see ‘positive deviancy’? What can you do to support these people?

COMMENTS: I have turned off comments because of automated trolls and their random text messages. Feel free to email me. This piece is based ion an extract from my latest book, Lead with Wisdom (Wiley, 2014).