Positive Deviant

Sternin took his positive-deviance program to a total of 14 Vietnamese villages after succeeding in the initial 4. As the program grew, it uncovered new solutions in new localities -- sesame seeds, peanuts, snails. The answers were never quite the same. Different solutions grew out of different soils. But the process remained the same: Discover original local answers to the problem, and then give everyone access to the secrets.

"Save the Children came up with the idea of a living university," says Sternin. "We took the first 14 villages in different phases of the program and turned them into a social laboratory. People who wanted to replicate the nutrition model came from different parts of Vietnam. Every day, they would go to this living university, to these villages, touching, smelling, sniffing, watching, listening. They would "graduate," go to their villages, and implement the process until they got it right. Then they would use their village as their own mini living university to expand the program locally. In effect, the entire village itself would become the positive deviant for the neighboring villages. 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."

Over the past decade, positive deviance has been applied to the problem of malnutrition in more than 20 countries through Save the Children. Other non-governmental organizations have applied it in many countries as well, including Bangladesh, Bhutan, Bolivia, Cambodia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Myanmar, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

News of Sternin's work in Vietnam spread rapidly among a variety of non-governmental organizations. Positive deviance is now being applied around the world to change behavior in a variety of other social and organizational situations, such as the spread of AIDs in the Third World and ethnic conflicts in Africa.

Although he has not worked as a consultant within a business setting himself, Sternin says that the HR department at Hewlett-Packard has shown interest in using positive deviance to identify ways to improve quality of work and worker satisfaction. And the European offices of management-consulting group Rath & Strong have applied the practice within many manufacturing companies.

"A very successful pharmaceutical company had one unit that far outsold all of the other groups," Sternin says. "They believed at the time that the more sales reps you had and the more calls you made on customers, the more you would sell. The positive deviants within the company, the most successful units, had fewer salespeople, and they made fewer calls. They made one-third the number of customer visits per day. They found that these reps were spending far more time with individual doctors, educating them on the benefits and the uses of the products that they sold, talking about research. And they were outselling the others by a big margin."

But the effect of the positive-deviant model for change can't be measured entirely by the numbers, or by the obvious results. The people Sternin has helped throughout the world have invariably felt that he not only solved problems by showing them how to change but also altered their lives in fundamental ways too deep to measure. The message that Sternin carries with him as he continues his work as his own form of a positive deviant comes from a Bangladeshi village woman. "Let us tell you about the changes in our lives," the villager told Sternin and his wife. "We were like seeds locked up in a dark place, and now we have found the light."

David Dorsey (dedorsey@rochester.rr.com) is a best-selling business author and a novelist. contact Jerry Sternin by email (jsternin@scusmyanmar.org), or visit Save the Children on the Web (www.savethechildren.com).