Positive Deviant

The following is an excerpt from the full article.

Jerry Sternin's job was to help save starving children in Vietnam. Faced with an impossible time frame, he adopted a radical approach to making change. His idea: Real change begins from the inside.

"...Change artists come into town, offer their wisdom, collect their fees, and then head home, where they design more offerings, conduct more research, and pen more books. In a time of dizzying change, change programs are a growth industry. And not surprisingly, these change programs almost never work. The consultants decamp, and the company reverts to form. The book gets read, maybe even passed around, and the company reverts to form. The motivational speaker leaves to applause, and the company reverts to form.

Maybe, says Jerry Sternin, the problem isn't with the outside experts or with the company. "The traditional model for social and organizational change doesn't work," says Sternin, 62. "It never has. You can't bring permanent solutions in from outside." Maybe the problem is with the whole model for how change can actually happen. Maybe the problem is that you can't import change from the outside in. Instead, you have to find small, successful but "deviant" practices that are already working in the organization and amplify them. Maybe, just maybe, the answer is already alive in the organization -- and change comes when you find it.

At least that's what Sternin thinks. And he should know -- not because he's charged corporations millions of dollars to lead them through change efforts but because he has helped save thousands of children's lives by embracing an approach to change that intentionally, forcefully, dramatically, and successfully flies in the face of conventional wisdom.

Sternin's approach traces back to work done by Marian Zeitlin at Tufts University in the late 1980s. At the time, Zeitlin was doing research in hospitals in developing communities to find out why a small handful of malnourished children -- the "deviants" -- were doing much better than the majority. What enabled some children to rehabilitate more quickly than others?

From this research came the idea of "amplifying positive deviance" -- a theory that Sternin and his wife, Monique, put to the test in the 1990s in a dramatically different setting: Vietnam. As staff members of Save the Children, the Sternins helped create a Vietnamese branch of the organization in response to a request by the Vietnamese government to help fight the problem of malnutrition in the country's villages. But once there, the reception accorded the Sternins and Save the Children by the Vietnamese government was less than cordial: They had six months to produce results -- and then it was time to head home.

Faced with a difficult task and an impossible time frame, Sternin reached for an unconventional solution: amplifying positive deviance. "We call conventional wisdom about malnutrition 'true but useless,' or 'TBU,' " says Sternin, sitting high above White Pond, not far from Walden Pond, near Boston. Sternin is on one of his brief stays at his home in the United States before he returns to his work with Save the Children in Myanmar. "It's all about poor sanitation, ignorance, food-distribution patterns, poverty, and a lack of access to good water. Millions of kids can't wait for those issues to be addressed. While you are there, things improve, but as soon as you leave, things revert back to the baseline. Nothing has changed. The solutions are yours. The resources are yours. When you leave, everything else leaves with you...."