Introduction to Positive Deviance

Positive Deviance in action: Maternal and newborn care project in Vietnam

A recent article in the Guardian by Jane Dudman gives a good introduction to the Positive Deviance model, a method of solving ‘intractable’ social and organisational problems through the principle that:

…in every community or organisation, there are some people who do better than others, even though everyone has the same resources. By finding how what works well, the whole community or organisation can implement improved practices.

A second article homes in on one example of how the Positive Deviance approach is being used to reduce antisocial behaviour in Gosport, Hampshire, by finding families where children behave well, discovering what they are doing differently, and how this can be copied by local parents.

The approach has some obvious similarities with Appreciative Inquiry – the focus on what is working rather than problems, looking for examples of positive exceptions, and the need to involve everyone so that they own the solutions.

The Positive Deviance Initiative has produced some accessible guides and tools downloadable from their web site, which are well worth a look for Appreciative Inquiry practitioners (NB if you found that the link to this site in the first Guardian article doesn’t work,  you can use the one above). It also has case studies from many Positive Deviance projects around the world, such as the Maternal and Newborn Care project in Vietnam.

I particularly liked this quote from the Basic Guide to the Positive Deviance (PD) Approach:

“Act your way into a new way of thinking instead of thinking your way into a new way of acting”

Appreciative Inquiry for teambuilding

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) makes an excellent format for teambuilding. It can be very rewarding for a team to work through the 4-D cycle, each stage building on the one before. A day (or slightly less than a day) gives enough time to really go into some depth, reaffirm bonds within the team, and build morale and confidence.

For the day to run smoothly it’s important to choose carefully the affirmative topic for the inquiry. Often some variation of “How do we work together more effectively?” will work well.

In the Discovery stage, having team members interview each other to unearth stories of when they have experienced or participated in exceptionally good examples of the topic can help to remind interviewees of their own worth, and that there are times – often forgotten in the hurly-burly of day-to-day work – when the team can work exceptionally well together. The interviewers often also feel inspired as they hear stories that resonate with their own experience and values.

To get the maximum value from the Discovery stage, have people who don’t normally work closely together interview each other. Interviewing across different responsibilities or levels of management can build understanding and appreciation of the contribution and viewpoints of people in different roles.

In the Dream stage, team members co-construct a vision of their desired future as a team. This can be a opportunity for people to loosen up and have fun as they create a presentation of their vision using words, collage, or even on occasion poetry, ‘living sculpture’, or song.

For the Design stage we now favour taking specific aspects of the Dream – whichever elements the team feels most motivated to work on – and letting the team use a adapted fishbone diagrams and ’swimming lanes’ to identify tasks, structures and relationships that need to be in place to translate into an action plan.

Finally, for the Delivery stage team members can make requests, offer to help other team members with their needs, and make commitments to take specific actions or take responsibility for ensuring that something happens.

These photos come from a recent teambuilding day we facilitated for the Occuptional Health team at Mid-Essex Hospital Trust. Denise Mortimer, a project manager at the Trust who commissioned us, wrote the day up for the Trust’s internal magazine:

On 16th September the Occupational Health Department embarked on a team building event with inspiring results! The team were introduced to ‘Appreciative Inquiry’ which is a process that works by acknowledging and building on what is good and what works well, instead of focusing on the negative.  Often we focus on what our problems are and as a result we tend to magnify those problems, which only contribute to a downward spiral of feeling helpless and hopeless.  With Appreciative Inquiry we get to reconnect with what we love about work and when we are at our best, resulting in people feeling inspired to take action and creating more positivity in the workplace.

By the end of the session the group were left feeling inspired with realistic actions that were genuinely created and owned by them. With a lot of laughter and a lot of no-nonsense talk about what needs to happen, the group now have to build on the momentum of the day and they certainly seemed ready to!

We were pleased to help Denise, a graduate of our Practical Appreciative Inquiry facilitator training, to co-facilitate the day. She is now being asked to run other Appreciative Inquiry events within the NHS.

The next Practical Appreciative Inquiry facilitator training runs in Manchester on 21-22 October – there are still some spaces available but you need to get your booking in fast!

Appreciative Inquiry: better ways of doing the Design stage

Read almost any textbook on Appreciative Inquiry and you will find a frustrating vagueness about what to actually do in the Design stage. This stage, which follows on from the Discovery of what is already working well, and the Dream about how the organisation could be at its best, is generally agreed to be about designing the “organisational architecture” – the new systems, groupings and information flows which will make it possible to have more ‘peak experiences’.

But how to go about it? The advice is generally to keep the Dream in mind, think about what systems etc will be needed, and then devise one or more “Provocative Propositions” – inspirational, stretching, present-tense statements which describe the organisation at its best, and give people something to live up to.

Actually doing this in practice, especially in a whole-organisation “AI summit” where there is limited time and most of the participants are not trained AI practitioners, is challenging. Particularly as if taken literally, the textbooks would have you come down one or two levels of detail from the big-picture vision described in the Dream stage to the nuts and bolts of systems design – and then soar up again to the realms of metaphor to craft your provocative proposition!

Here’s an alternative that we have been playing with – I expect there are other AI practitioners that do something similar already, but you wouldn’t know it from the published books on AI that I’m aware of. I’m talking specifically about how to set up the Design stage in the AI summit format – whether this is for a Positive Engagement event for the whole of an organisation and its stakeholders, or for a small teambuilding away day.

1. Possibility Statements

After the creative expression of the Dream (as a collage, presentation, living sculpture or whatever – people can get very creative), ask the participants to craft a “possibility statement” (an alternative and I think more user-friendly name for “provocative proposition” – you can call it whatever will best convey what it’s for and will best fit the organisational culture). Here are the criteria that we used for a recent event for the fine social enterprise and recruitment consultancy Vedas in Burnley, UK:

To me, it makes sense to craft Provocative Propositions right after the Dream – people are still inspired, and the Propositions are at a similar big-picture level of abstraction to the Dream vision. The Propositions can then act as a bridge into the more detailed work of the Design stage, as participants collaborate in designing what has to be in place to make the various elements of the Dream actually happen.

2. Using “Fishbone Analysis” in the Design stage

Usually, fishbone analysis or “Ishikawa diagrams” are used to find the root cause of problems – as in this illustration from Wikipedia.org:

Please restrain your horror at the use of the word “problem”, because we are going to use it for pretty much the opposite – an inclusive process to find the route to the Dream.

For each table of 4-8 people in the AI summit, we give them a blank fishbone diagram on a sheet of flipchart paper. In the ‘head’ of the diagram, they write the part of the Dream that they want to bring into reality.

In the boxes at the end of each ’spine’ of the fishbone, they write an area for which action needs to be taken to make the Dream happen. You can leave this up to the participants, or you can give them preprinted ‘classic’ Fishbone categories like: Equipment, Process, People, Materials, Environment, and Management.

Along each spine of the fishbone, participants place post-it notes with the actions that have to be taken, or the things that have to be in place, to make that area support the Dream goal. Our tip is to use a different colour post-it for each area, and use small notes so there’s enough room for them on the diagram. The process will go faster if smaller groups of participants take an area or two each – but make sure everyone gets to see the end results for each area, to make sure nothing is missed.

The beauty of this process is that it’s inclusive – everyone gets to contribute – and it’s fast. A team can rough out what’s needed in a very short time.

3. Turning the fishbone into an action plan

At this point the design elements have been identified, but dependencies have not, and the elements will probably not be in time order. To turn the fishbones into plans, we stick several sheets of flipchart paper to a wall, and establish a series of horizontal lines – one for each area on the ’spines’ of the fishbone.

Participants can then transfer the sticky note for each element they have identified onto a timeline, in the order dictated by any dependencies that they identify between the design elements. When the timeline for each Dream component is laid out, it’s easy for participants to see dependencies between the different timelines too, and adjust the placing of the individual actions accordingly.

Timescales and milestones can be added later, probably by a smaller team with responsibility making the goals happen.

I hope that’s given you some ideas – if you use them, or something similar, please share your experiences by leaving a comment.

A question to amplify positive emotion

“How does it feel to realise that?” is a great question to ask in an appreciative interview whenever someone tells you about some ‘lightbulb moment’ or a time when they made a real difference.

This week I was facilitating an Appreciative Inquiry session for Dreamcatchers, a small charity that does solution-focused youth work, to help them clarify their ‘brand’ and how to communicate it to various stakeholders (more about how to use Appreciative Inquiry in branding in a future posting).

The management team were deeply into appreciative interviews (using a variation on the ’standard’ appreciative interview questions) when a late-comer arrived – so I stepped in to conduct his interview myself. As often happens, it took him a while to warm up to the question “What has been the best experience of working in the Dreamcatchers?”  At first he came out with a fairly generic answer about making a difference to people’s lives. In fact we had completed the interview sheet when he said “I’ve just thought of another one.”

He went on to tell me about a presentation he and a colleague had done about guns, gangs and girls in gangs – a girl who saw the presentation had come up to him months later and said that it had saved her from joining the gang she had been on the fringes of, and helped her to straighten out her life. He realised more fully than before that the work he was doing really made a difference to people’s lives, possibly saving that girl’s life and maybe – through her example – having a positive influence on the lives of other girls that he’d never even met.

So I asked him, “How does it feel to realise that?” What does this question do? Firstly, it encourages the interviewee to become aware of how they feel about the realisation. It amplifies positive emotions – which, following the Positive Principle and Barbara Fredrickson’s ‘Broaden and Build’ theory, make an individual more effective and are vital for positive organisational change. Secondly, the enhanced emotion will tend to make the memory of the realisation more vivid and easier to recall in future, so it becomes a reference experience that strengthens the individual’s self-concept and identity, helping them to be more motivated in their role.

I originally came across this question in NLP, where it is used in therapy or coaching to help a client ‘lock in’ a breakthrough or realisation and prevent them from forgetting it and slipping back into the pre-breakthrough state.

Naturally, since the question explicitly asks the person to focus on their feelings, you would only ask it about ‘positive’ events and realisations.

Appreciative Feedback Form

Have you ever wondered how you could use the 4-D appreciative inquiry format for gathering feedback? This is a draft of what we will be sending out to people who have completed our courses.

One of the virtues of making the 4-D structure explicit in the form is that it acts as another reminder for the students.

Feel free to adapt the questions to your own needs.
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Now that you have had some time to reflect on and use what you learned on
the Practical Appreciative Inquiry facilitator training, it may be the
appropriate time to ask for some feedback. We are road-testing a 4-D
feedback request structure – feel free to copy or adapt it if it works for
you:

1. Discovery
What did you appreciate about the course? What were the best aspects for
you?

2. Dream
What would the course have been like in an ideal world?

3. Design
What practical changes could we make to the course to make it better?

4. Delivery
How have you been using the Appreciative Inquiry methods you learned on the
course? What are you doing differently now?

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Let us know what you think!