The book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, cites Jerry Sternin’s experience with Save the Children during the 1990s as a fascinating case study of change management.
The late Sternin, a humanitarian and educator, based a career on the power of “positive deviance” — an optimistic problem-solving approach with roots in late 1980s’ Tufts University research. The premise: Identify the “deviants” within an organization who, operating outside conventional norms, reach outcomes that reflect the desired goals or changes. Then, spotlight those individuals, and encourage replication of their methods – and ideally, their success – within the rest of the organization.
In this case, Sternin was on assignment to reduce child malnutrition in Vietnam. In a poverty-stricken nation with a limited food supply, water and sanitation issues and only a few months to show progress, that’s a tall order.
You’re probably wondering what malnutrition in Vietnam has to do with employee communications. The common thread is that to achieve a grand vision (think organizational culture change), you must start with specific, and often small, shifts in behavior.
Whether the goal is to become more flexible, customer-focused or innovative, it’s important that everyone – starting with leadership – understands the answer to a few key questions, including:
- When we achieve our desired culture, what are we doing every day to support that change?
- How does this change affect my work?
- What does success look like?
Back to Sternin. He understood the need to change specific behaviors and started by studying the change he wanted to see – the precious few families who weren’t starving – to uncover their “deviant” behaviors. Think of them as “bright spot” examples.
Sternin learned that the mothers with the healthiest children exercised markedly different behaviors than their peers. They supplemented the standard rice diet with greens and tiny crabs. Their children ate small portions, multiple times a day, bucking tradition’s twice-daily meals. And they fed their children to ensure they ate.
Communicating a culture change also can benefit from a “bright spot” strategy. Rather than focusing on things employees must change, this strategy focuses on demonstrating how positive change is already happening.
But there’s more to Sternin’s lesson. He used his insights to develop a strategy that empowered the mothers to teach one another. It worked, bearing out another change principle: Solutions that come from within an organization are powerful – they not only demonstrate what the desired behavior changes look like, they show how it’s done. Conversely, solutions brought in from the outside may not be perceived as workable “here.”
My takeaways as a communicator?
- Capture and share the bright spot successes. Through storytelling, employees share firsthand accounts, making it a peer-to-peer learning experience rather than something implemented by the top tier (just like the mothers in Vietnam).
- Recognize the bright spots. Recognition showcases desired behavior and rewards it, reinforcing change’s positive effects and giving employees something to work toward.
That last point is key, because the work doesn’t end once change begins. Successful companies provide environments where employees are comfortable learning and trying new things, encouraging even better results. As Sternin’s says: “Let the deviants adopt deviations on their own.” The change then becomes theirs, not something that is force fed.
And that, as Sternin has shown us, can make all the difference.
What is your perspective on positive deviance – or focusing on the “bright spots” – as an effective behavior change strategy? Tell us what you think.
Also key to the Sternin method is trust and credibility. By enlisting those within the organization to help drive change, the masses are likely to be less resistant to adopting the new behaviors. If the desired actions are acceptable for their peers to embrace, then those actions are likely to be seen as acceptable for themselves.
Similar logic applies to recognition. Typically, when employees see their peers recognized for being early adopters or change leaders — and realize that similar recognition is available to them for demonstrating those same types of behiavors — employees will be more likely to follow suit.
This post really got me thinking about how behavior modeling and recognition are instrumental to most internal change initiatives. Where some companies fall short, I think, is that they do not spend enough time up front identifying what those desired behaviors look like. Only then can you really show employees what they should be doing to achieve desired results.