Fast Pack 2000

The workers decided to develop a program based on the way the healthy children ate to teach everyone in the village how to feed their children nutritiously. They offered two-week sessions, during which parents practiced gathering foods from the village that would benefit their children. After two years, 93% of the kids whose parents had participated in the program had been rehabilitated -- and, more important, they remained that way for a long time.

What the field-workers had done was to apply "positive deviance" -- a concept created by nutritionist Marian Zeitlan that absolutely contradicts the so-called expert model of change that most organizations use. According to the expert model, if you bring in an expert to stir the pot, then eventually everybody will be convinced that they need to change. Positive deviance says that if you want to create change, you must scale it down to the lowest level of granularity and look for people within the social system who are already manifesting the desired future state. Take only the arrows that are already pointing toward the way you want to go, and ignore the others. Identify and differentiate those people who are headed in the right direction. Give them visibility and resources. Bring them together. Aggregate them.

In most organizations, the people who are pointed in the right direction are isolated in small working groups. They're alone; they feel as if they're the only ones who get it. But if you bring them together, even if it's only for one day, suddenly they're in the majority! They start their own newsletter or chat group. And in the process, they amplify who they are, and they demonstrate in a powerful, visible way that they are not alone. These are the concepts that begin to offer us a sense of the emerging paradigm for change.

Chris Turner

I was at Xerox for 16 years, most of that time as a line manager. And because I was always nearly 300 miles away from my boss, I figured out how to work within a system while going around it at the same time. When Xerox wanted to create a strategy for transformation, they asked me to lead it. So in this large, widely dispersed organization, I helped establish a new kind of community -- one with 15,000 exceptional businesspeople.

We did this by treating the company as a natural system. And because the way you change a natural system is by disturbing it, we disturbed our company in a bunch of ways: We did an ethnographic study of the culture, and we found kindred spirits and brought them together. We also created experiential-learning events called Camp Lur'ning, which consisted of large-group activities where we created the future that we wanted at that moment, so that people could experience it. And in the process, we challenged the assumptions of how work really got done in our organization.

We also were able to combine different approaches for getting people to learn. We realized that the only way to get large-scale productivity improvements was to make everybody in the organization totally aware of how we make money, totally familiar with our profit-and-loss picture, and totally informed on a daily basis of the decisions that were being made that affected our performance. We ultimately created a new level of consciousness.

Jeff Taylor

My experience is of a different scale -- it's with a startup. And it's at a different level -- it revolves around my senior managers. I found that, not unlike a lot of work relationships, the relationships between my senior managers were very thin. Everyone was friendly, but getting people to rally was really difficult. So last September, I took all 14 managers to an off-site. I didn't tell them what we were going to do. I took away their cell-phones, and I made sure that nobody could do any business that day.

I told them that there was only one thing that we had to do: I wanted everyone to pick five or six defining moments in their life, and then each of us would present one of those moments. And I said that I would go first.

Of course, I'd had three weeks to get prepared and to get all emotional about it. So by the end of 20 minutes, I'd shared my experience, I'd had a good cry, and I'd set the tone for the rest of the day. Nine hours later, all of the senior managers had completed the task. And when we left, the relationships that had formed between team members were absolutely huge. After five years in the business, our culture is still innovative, and we still look for ways to keep growing the grassroots experiences.

Terri Lonier