Positive Deviance

“Social challenges require systematic solutions that are grounded in the client’s or customer’s needs”[1] This summarise the articles premise of building social ventures that can be compatible with the ground realities of the society they cater to.  The article builds up a case for the importance, value, and need for design thinking in the creation of business and social systems. A key insight that the article has to offer is one regarding ‘Positive Deviance’. Positive deviance is a concept that is well rooted in the principles of providing ‘inside solutions’[2]to problems instead of imposing them from the outside.

Positive Deviance focuses on developing sustainable solutions to problems in a way that creates an almost automated system that ends up reducing or altogether eliminating the initial problem. The way that Positive Deviance does this is through the creation of solutions from elements that are already existent in the system or community instead of bringing in new elements from outside the system. [3]

In my experience working for the Association For the Development of Pakistan (ADP), I realised that many social ventures tend to miss out on vital opportunities in catering to significant parts of the community due to inherent flaws in the design. Design Thinking is a very plausible way of overcoming these flaws and Positive Deviance, in its essence, can be the key that puts design thinking to action. My work with ADP sent me to various schools in interior Sindh (a poor region of Pakistan, where adult literacy is as low as 20%)[4]. While there, I discovered that although a lot of money and resources were being spent on the schools (infrastructure, trainings, etc.), the students and their families were hardly benefitting from these endeavours as due to cultural barriers most families were not sending their children to these schools which were being run by ‘outsiders’. The application of Positive Deviance in such a case would have proved beneficial where the local community would have been observed, local children and their families would have been observed, and any ‘positive deviants’ would have been selected in order to create a sustainable solution for the school systems in that community.

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[1,2] Design Thinking for Social Innovation By Tim Brown & Jocelyn Wyatt

[3] The Positive Deviance Approach to Behavioral and Social Change By R. Swartz

[4] The Invisible Partition of Sindh By Tahir Mehdi