RESEARCH: Richard Pascale with Jerry Sternin have been investigating the power of ‘positive deviance’ since the early 1990’s. Positive deviance is the phenomenon that when everyone appears to be doing badly there are usually one or two individuals who are succeeding – and by studying what they are doing differently (the positive deviance) a better method can be found.
Richard Pascale explains in their book ‘The Power of Positive Deviance’ that to successfully benefit from positive deviance takes much more than just spotting how someone is working differently from the crowd. It requires the leaders and influencers to prick up their antenna and become aware of how other people, the do-ers not the leaders, are operating. It needs them to be much more observational than instructional – and then to communicate the new methods in a way that can gather momentum and be enacted collectively. It requires leadership that is both enabling and collective – it is very much the ‘new’ style of leadership – but as Pascale points out it is also a very natural way of operating. Indeed it is nature’s way, small incremental, evolving and therefore evolutionary changes – and not the old ‘grandiose project’ approach.
Pascale describes this analogy from behavioral biology to make the point:
In Britain in the late nineteenth century, certain birds gained notoriety for ingenuity displayed in pilfering cream from milk bottles. Initially, dairymen delivered milk to the doorstep, dispensing it into customers’ jugs. Cream floated to the top. Birds and other mammals gained unobstructed access to a tasty, high-protein dietary supplement. When, in 1894, caps were installed to thwart the raiders, the free lunch came to an abrupt end. Except, that is, for a few species of birds that figured out how to cope with the obstruction.
Pertinent to our story is not that a few clever individuals discovered that a well-placed peck could pierce the cap, but how the discovery was disseminated. The contrast between robins and magpies is instructive. Robins are highly territorial, live comparatively isolated lives, and vocalize primarily to demarcate their territory.
The magpie, by way of contrast, is highly social and leverages its intelligence accordingly. Magpies, with a brain to overall body weight ratio only slightly lower than that of humans, exhibit unusual levels of social awareness. Rivaling chimpanzees, they can (along with humans, dolphins, elephants, and great apes) recognize their own unique image in a mirror. Concept of ‘self’ is common to advanced social systems.
Magpies are gregarious in winter, they gather to roost at night. They team up in bands to tease cats and dive-bomb predators. Demonstrating empathy and social altruism, cooperative breeding occurs from time to time, with additional adults helping to raise nestlings. Young magpies play elaborate social games, including king of the mountain, passing sticks, and sliding down smooth surfaces. They can work collectively to lift garbage bin lids as members take turns feeding. One flock figured out how to crack nuts by placing them in crosswalks, letting passing cars break the husks, and waiting for the red light before safely retrieving the cont
ents.
Unsurprisingly, the magpie’s social intelligence disseminated bottle cap piercing techniques to millions of birds throughout Britain within a few years.
The robin, on the other hand, was destined to compartmentalized success. Cap piercings by isolated individuals were not coupled with social diffusion. The occasional robin might pick up the technique from its mate. Juveniles might observe the method from a parent if the nest was within sight of a milk bottle. But absence of an evolved social network deprived the species as a whole.
The lessons are manifold – in order to benefit from group intelligence without going through a full crowd-sourcing process, leaders need to adapt their behaviour to be more community and communication aware. Leadership is a behavioural issue.
Further Information:
The Positive Deviance Initiative
Buy the book
'The Power of Positive Deviance'
