Time Travelers, Honey Badgers & Positive Deviants

Positive Deviants Fellowship #2

Are you a Positive Deviant?

The application and nomination process for the 2025 Positive Deviants Fellowship is underway, and over the coming weeks – while the portal is still open -  I’ll dive a little deeper into some of the program’s underlying theory and methods.

We’re often surprised at how many people broadly identify with the term positive deviant. We like how it rolls off the tongue, and we’re also using in a very specific way.

We sometimes say that a positive deviant is a kind of time traveler.

They come from the future—whether they realize it or not. Because they represent one of the ways a potential future is already alive in the current system. Their deviance is more mathematical than cultural; it is certainly not performatively contrarian, rebellious or reactive. It is often the anomalous bright spot in an otherwise bleak set of outcomes. Positive deviants are not only statistical outliers that deviate from a sub-optimal or dysfunctional norm; they are social proof that there is a different way to do things.

Any living system – individuals, organizations, societies, ecosystems – must continually adapt to its external environment if it is to survive and flourish. A complexity lens reminds us that patterns of successful adaptation are always alive somewhere in the system – often in zones of fertile instability at the system’s margin.

Positive deviance is a well-established systems intervention approach that seeks to find, learn from and then replicate such patterns of successful adaptation.

In any challenge context, some people (whether individuals or groups) seem to succeed, thrive or just get qualitatively ‘better’ results in some way – despite having the same opportunities, resources and constraints as everybody else. Positive deviance is about bringing focused attention and curiosity to such patterns of success using both close observation and broad data sets. What are the specific strategies, actions, mindsets or belief systems that lead to such divergent outcomes? To put it very crudely, it is about ‘studying the solution’ rather than ‘studying the problem.’

It sounds simple. But it runs counter to most systems intervention strategies.

Positive deviance as a methodology famously emerged from efforts to address child malnutrition and MRSA infections in hospitals. It has subsequently been applied to a wildly diverse range of settings; improving educational outcomes, increasing agricultural yields, minimizing workplace accidents (Safety II approaches), enhancing water & rangeland management systems, addressing large-scale public health challenges, reducing rates of family violence and recidivism, improving cyber-security practices, designing micro-finance initiatives, stimulating organizational productivity and even  successfully rolling out SAP and other integrated software platforms or technologies across large institutional networks.  

Positive deviance is therefore both a systems property – something that is constantly emerging within complex living systems – and a methodology for finding and learning from such phenomena. It reminds us to:

• Seek patterns of emergence and possibility already alive within any system.

• Look for people, processes, places that deviate positively from the norm.

• Focus on what’s working rather than what’s missing or broken.

• Recognize that possibilities for change emerge from within living systems.

• Remain perpetually curious, respectful and humble.

• Embrace genuine difference and diversity as vital community resources.

• Entertain big questions and move with curiosity rather than certainty.

• Build living models of what is possible.

It sounds easy. But it isn’t!

You can teach someone how to use a positive deviance methodology. But you can’t teach someone to be a positive deviant any more than you can teach someone to be an Elder. And the main reason is because their deviance is just as much a systems property as it is a set of personal attributes. We are often asking as many questions about the system as we are about an individual applicant who seeks to influence it. Is that system far from equilibrium? What kinds of pressures are shaping it? What patterns of novel interaction, self-organization or beneficial coherence seem to be emerging within or around it? What kinds of unconscious, ritualized or habitual patterns might be constraining its capacity for self-renewal and adaptation? And given all that, how might this person be shaped by, entangled within and potentially poised to definitively influence these overlapping properties and relational dynamics?

The reality is, there are a lot of people who genuinely believe themselves to be positive deviants and agents of systems change whose work is actually strengthening the very systems dynamics they seek to transform. Others are working within a range of anti-systemic boundary conditions that currently constrain the likelihood of meaningful impact. And some are just facing backwards and shouting as they are carried down the river.

We all have critical roles to play and ways to authentically participate in these times. Being a positive deviant isn’t better than any other form of participation and the selection process is not a vote on anyone’s worthiness or capacity for impacting the world. The Fellowship is simply a particular kind of learning space designed to support two specific kinds of positive deviants. We sometimes think of them as innovators and eco-system builders.

-       Innovators: people whose work (insights, products, processes, breakthrough technologies, platforms, designs, innovations, systems leadership etc.) is poised to make a tangible impact at scale around issues of critical concern. They are living models of adjacent possibility. Network attractors around whom patterns of successful adaptation and beneficial coherence begin to coalesce. They have tangible projects and they’re on the move.

-       Eco-system builders: people who find, fund, support, catalyze, connect, amplify or otherwise uplift patterns of successful adaptation and emergence. They are often boundary spanning generalists with high complexity awareness who are comfortable with both structure and creativity. They provide a critical adaptive leadership function within - and between - organizations, networks, domains of expertise, knowledge cultures, ecologies of practice, and systems of all kinds.

These two groups have some important differences, along with some distinct learning needs and developmental edges. But both seem to share a certain kind of moral courage, creativity and dogged tenacity. They often have a strong sense of purpose or calling that guides them. They display a weird combination of humility and audacity. They are invariably wildly curious, they’re willing to experiment and they take risks. They dream big and seem to ‘see’ connections, patterns and possibilities that are often invisible to the rest of us. And they have a history of ‘going for it’.

Sometimes, when you bring them together, you catch a glimpse of our collective potential.

Other times, it’s like being in a room full of belligerent honey badgers.

One thing is certain. They’re not easy to find!

But if any of this sounds like you - or someone you know -  we’d love to read your application or check out your nomination.