In 1990, an American couple named Jerry and Monique Sternin were sent by Save the Children to fight severe malnutrition in the rural communities of Vietnam.

Tired of  approaches that had cost lots and delivered little, the Vietnamese Foreign Minister gave them just 6 months to make an impact.

With little time to look for systemic causes the Sternins decided to build upon what was already there,  rather than parachute in new solutions. So they travelled to various villages and sought out the real experts: the mothers.  

The Sternins started from an unusual perspective. Rather than zeroing in on the mothers who were experiencing difficulty they sought out the ones who were thriving despite the system around them.

And in the same system that was failing the many, they found unusual practice amongst those who were thriving.

• They were feeding their children smaller portions of food, but they were feeding them more frequently.
• They were taking ‘low class’ food, like brine shrimp from the paddy fields that was stigmatised by others, and adding these to their daily soups or rice dishes.
• They were ignoring the socially acceptable norm to feed family elders first – and serving their kids from the bottom of the pot, making sure that they got the most nutritious food that had settled during cooking.

Sternin later termed these people ‘positive deviants’ – those who have, without realising it, discovered the path to success for the entire group.

Positive – in that they are doing something that achieves a fundamentally good outcome.

Deviant – in that their methods are not normal or universally understood or accepted.  They may even be frowned upon or distrusted by peers or authority figures.

Alleviating the problem didn’t require huge resources or some big programme – it simply required connecting other community members with these ‘positive deviants’ and encouraging them to start emulating their behaviour.

Sternin went on to define Positive Deviance as a strength-based approach with some core principles: 

Communities possess the solutions and expertise to best address their own problems

These communities are self-organising with sufficient human resources and assets to derive solutions to communal problems

Communities possess a ‘collective intelligence’, equally distributed through the community, which the approach seeks to foster and draw out

The foundation of the approach rests on the act of enabling a community to discover solutions to their own problems.

In most social purpose organisations our behaviours are the exact opposite of this. 

If positive deviance is about discovering who is thriving against all odds, our default mode is deficit fetishism—where we spend our time mapping human failure, and designing standardised interventions.

You’ll see it every day, just as I do. 

Segmenting by Stigma: Splitting human lives into analytical buckets based entirely on what they lack—creating “High-Risk,” “ Disengaged,” or “Digitally Excluded” segments instead of  mapping local strengths, networks, or assets.

Targeting the Symptom, Ignoring the System: Setting up specialised enforcement approaches for persistent rent arrears or missed payments—chasing the money through formal warnings while completely ignoring the structural friction causing the delay.

Problem-Built Organisational Charts: Designing entire internal departments, team titles, and manager roles around a failure state ensuring the team’s professional identity and budget rely on the problem never actually disappearing.

Weaponised KPIs: Measuring team success by the volume of interventions delivered rather than whether people are actually thriving or becoming independent of the system.

Compliance over Capability: Treating a resident who creatively solves their own problem outside official channels as a “compliance risk” to be corrected, while rewarding the resident who passively follows every rigid rule into total institutional dependency.

An organisation’s inability to distinguish between destructive non-compliance and grassroots innovation is rarely a case of intentional malice; rather, it is a structural byproduct of how institutions are designed.

To a formal system, all deviance looks identical from the outside. 

A colleague bending the procurement rules to buy a piece of equipment for a guerrilla gardener looks the same as someone fiddling their expenses.

The guerrilla gardener taking over a piece of land to start a community allotment looks the same as the person causing anti-social behaviour. 

Standard operating procedures, compliance metrics, and risk-mitigation protocols exist precisely to create predictability and eliminate variance. Positive deviants , on the other hand, are unpredictable and divergent.

As someone working in an organisation that is making a long term strategic shift to place based working, the first step is the realisation that you cannot tackle all this at once.

As we build a strategy that re-orients the organisation away from focusing on demand, we need to seek out positive deviants both in our colleague base and in the community. Our first step was the appointment of Place Leads. This role isn’t just managing a team — it’s standing between the institution and the place, absorbing the noise so colleagues keep their time and residents get a relationship, not a bureaucracy. It’s encouraging deviance rather than mere compliance.

When an organisation has deficit fetishism, failure becomes its primary currency. We build teams around the symptom, fund departments on the pathology, and measure our value by how many ‘vulnerable people’ we can identify—all while walking right past the people who quietly figured out how to fix it.

Our positive deviants, the people who’ve already figured things out, are among us. We just don’t look for them or even recognise the many problems they have already solved.

Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash