Yesterday, I attended a meeting with the Positive Deviance Institute, which happens to be a center (like mine) at Tufts University. Their approach is to work with partners in a community to identify the individuals, institutions, or families who avoid the problems that everyone else is suffering from. For example (see PDF), in a poor Vietnamese community, child nutrition was rampant, but some children from extremely poor families were well nourished. The Positive Deviance people used their community-based research strategy to help residents find out why. It turned out:

In every instance where a poor family had a well-nourished child, the mother or father was collecting tiny shrimps or crabs or snails (the size of one joint of one finger) from the rice paddies and adding these to the child’s diet along with the greens from sweet potato tops. Although readily available and free for the taking, the conventional wisdom held these foods to be inappropriate, or even dangerous, for young children.

[Also:] most families fed their young children only twice a day, before parents headed to the rice fields early in the morning and late afternoon after returning from a working day. Because these children under three years of age had small stomachs, they could only eat a small percent of the available rice at each sitting. The PD families, however, instructed the home babysitter (an older sibling, a grandparent or a neighbor) to feed the child regularly.

The intervention dramatically cut malnutrition.

PD reminds me, in some very general ways, of the work of our friends at The Right Question project, who have achieved remarkable results by training service-recipients to ask a few key, critical questions about the decisions that affect them.

And it reminds me of “social accountability” measures, which reduce corruption and improve services by giving citizens detailed information about public spending.

And it reminds me of John Gaventa’s Power Cube analysis, a simple but potentially transformative tool for analyzing and challenging power relations.

And it reminds me of asset-mapping, which was developed by John McKnight and John Kretzmann and used in many communities to create a strong foundation before outside aid is used.

These techniques have important common features:

• They show a high respect for poor people’s knowledge and ability
• They require training, but dramatically less training than it takes to become, say, a school teacher or a physician. The Positive Deviance Institute’s main training program takes 12 days.
• They are equally appropriate for many types of setting–schools, villages, hospitals–and for a variety of purposes.
• They run counter to the norms, assumptions, and incentives in most big institutions and professions.
• They have a different theory of how to go to (large) scale than is implicit in randomized experiments.

I think we need to understand which ones work, when, why, how well, for whom, for what purposes, and in what combinations. And then we need strategies for expanding them.