Breaking the Cycle of Poverty: How Positive Deviance Transformed Vietnam’s Malnutrition Problem
In his book, Surfing the Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business, author Richard Pascale relates a story of how to tap into the collective wisdom of a community to solve difficult problems.
By the late 1980s, Vietnam’s poorer remote villages were experiencing significant malnutrition amongst their children. But, the usual external expert methods to solve this problem, such as food drops, would only put a band-aid on the plight, be unsustainable, and not solve the crisis permanently and at its root. The predicament was also exacerbated by the traditional collaborators of endemic poverty: low education, scarce drinking water and food sources, marginalization of women, and poor sanitation.
In 1990, the humanitarian organization Save the Children decided to try a new approach to Vietnam’s hunger problem and approached researchers Jerry and Monique Sternin of Tufts University to formulate a better solution. Pioneered in the 1970s, the Sternins had advanced the theory of Positive Deviance, which discovered that despite the poverty in a community, some poor families had well-nourished children. These families had healthier children despite facing the same problems and access to the same knowledge and resources as their peers. These poor, but healthy children, were benefiting from their parents’ unique approaches and strategies to diet. The Sternin’s classified this group of well-nourished families as positively deviating from the norm.
Using this approach, the Sternin’s arrived in Vietnam and started their research in four poor villages, systematically weighing the children to find the positive deviants. Once the healthy children were identified, the research team set about to understand what these families were doing differently.
The researchers discovered that families with healthy children fed their kids more frequently, supplementing their daily rice diets with nutritionally dense and readily available freshwater crabs, shrimp, and sweet potato leaves. Save the Children used this knowledge to establish education for other families in the villages. Within six months, more than 66% of the children in the villages had improved their weight, and within two years, 85% of the children were no longer classified as malnourished. The program was so successful the Vietnamese government deployed the approach nationwide.
Insight and Application
The Sternins’ positive deviance model can address issues that demand improvements in individual behaviour and social dynamics. In their book, The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems, the Sternins and Richard Pascale outline Positive Deviance’s main principles:
· Communities already have the solutions contained within their people and social assets. The best people to solve a community’s problems are its own citizens.
· The community is collectively intelligent. The solution to a problem is never exclusively within the leadership of a community or outside experts. We must recognize that the answers to a social change problem lie in the collective intelligence and know-how dispersed throughout the community.
· Sustainability must be the foundation of any solution. The Positive Deviance approach enables the community or organization to seek and discover sustainable solutions to a given problem because the demonstrably successful uncommon behaviours are already practiced in that community within the constraints and challenges of the current situation.
· It is easier to change behaviour by practicing it rather than knowing about it. “It is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than think your way into a new way of acting.”
Leaders that adopt a Positive Deviance lens can often discover solutions to their problems hiding in plain sight.
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