Tim Brown’s article in Stanford’s SSIR this month covers Design Thinking for Social Innovation.
In the article, the importance of direct observation, and ethnographic inquiry, standard design staples are covered. Design thinking is defined as being “inherently optimistic, constructive, and experiential”.
Most of the stuff in the article is old hat to those with a multidisciplinary design background, but it’s the first time I’ve read about “positive deviance” and started exploring it a bit more.
From Wikipedia:
Positive Deviance (PD) is an approach to personal, organizational and cultural change based on the idea that every community or group of people performing a similar function has certain individuals (the “Positive Deviants”) whose special attitudes, practices/ strategies/ behaviors enable them to function more effectively than others with the exact same resources and conditions.[1] The premise of PD is that the superior practices of the Positive Deviants enable them to improve outcomes, and if those practices (also attitudes, thinking and behaviors) can be isolated then they can be used to improve the outcomes of others as well. An essential process in PD is the identification of ‘comps or peers.
Reading this reminds me of my consulting days and talking to clients about identifying and learning “best practices” and setting forth the plans to achieve them. It also occurs to me that the notion of searching for these positive deviants is akin to looking for “extreme” users. We often try to seek extreme users to understand where mainstream users could potentially evolve to in the future.
The more I thought about this for a while, I’m not so sure that it’s just as easy and extrapolating optimal behaviors from positive deviants. To corroborate this, I started poking around and found this: Positive Deviance and Extraordinary Organizing. Reading the paragraph about Tom from Tom’s of Maine (consequently, the toothpaste I use) was enlightening. It starts with the desire for meaning. Meaning isn’t fungible, and transferrable only by the positive deviant. Rarely by some other agent, and almost assuredly not by some change management consultant.
Getting back to the article, it’s exciting that Design is being used in the third sector to solve large problems. What a change from just a few years ago where the methodologies we use, while speaking with clients, were considered esoteric and shrouded in a veil of design “mystery”.
