What is this?
Overview
When we seek solutions for grand challenges in education, we are wise to not assume we need to design the solutions from scratch, but instead to first look for early signs where things are already working in the wider field–a phenomenon that has been referred to as “positive deviants” or “bright spots”–and then design the mechanisms to spread those existing outlier practices.
This approach is based on the observation that in any group there are individuals whose uncommon yet successful behaviors or strategies enable them to find better solutions to a problem than their peers–even despite facing similar challenges and having no additional resources or knowledge than that of their peers. Theoretically, such practices can be undertaken by others facing the same constraints.
The positive deviance approach could be useful if your department, school, district, or network is facing a problem that lots of folks might have attempted to solve on their own, but there’s no clear solution (this could be a classroom practice like getting students to turn in assignments on time, or could be a school-wide effort like encouraging students to complete financial aid materials). Basically, anything where lots of folks are facing the same problem, and there is a variety of approaches that have been tried. The key is to use a process to find out who has been most successful (sometimes they might not know they are such an exception!) and learn from them.
This document is a tool to organize your thinking, empathy work, and analysis as you define the problem, determine the positive deviants in your midst, seek what explains the positive deviants’ success, and quickly brainstorm ways to spread what they are doing.
We developed this tool during our d.school class Designing for More: Scaling Impact Within Education. Our students used this tool to uncover bright spots developed by successful high schools to improve their college admissions process.
How to use this:
Feel free to print out this tool and use it to structure your thinking in this iterative process. Keep in mind that there’s no one right way to go through this process, but there is a logic behind figuring out who is succeeding against the odds, and seeing what they’re doing. Also, unlike the traditional approach to human centered design, you’re not doing empathy work to understand needs, but rather to find existing solutions. Your design work is not to create the solutions, but to work with the communities to uncover their bright spots and encourage more folks to do what you have discovered is already working in the field.
How much time should I allot to using this tool?
The positive deviance process could take less than an hour to years and years. It’s definitely not a one-size-fits-all approach, but rather is a logic that can expand or contract depending on the problem and the context.
How have you used this?
In our class, students went through the four stages of this process over four weeks. It was a challenge to do virtually, but the students had a chance to practice the approach. First our students spent time engaging with their design partners, learning about their contexts and approaches and analyzing the data. Our students spent time really trying to understand how a process really worked by visualizing the process their design partners went through all the way down to what people said, how they behaved and what the process felt like. After understanding their design partners' bright spots, they went to work envisioning new ways other people could adopt this practice. In the end, students shared new ways one bright spot could become many bright spots.
One student reported, “I used to think design thinking was about a ‘think tank’ of ‘outside experts’ generating their own ideas then trying to see what fits within a local context. Now I think that design thinking done right is about using an outside lens to clarify what those experts within the system don’t realize is out of the ordinary.”
What is the logic model of this tool?
Completing worksheet ➭ Focusing on successful outliers in our midst ➭ Realization that one need not create the solution but instead to discover it.
Any tips on how to best utilize this?
The key to the process is being systematic about finding who is beating the odds, and then learning from them, and then figuring out how a community can do more of it.
This tool begins with the mindset that in a community, something is working. It uses an abundance mindset.
Credits
Marc Chun, K12 Lab