But if you look closely, you’ll find that the tyranny of averages always conceals sparkling exceptions to the rule. Some business problems-employees working at half their potential, endlessly escalating health care costs, conflicts between departments-never seem to get fixed, no matter how hard people try. The tactic generated buzz throughout the unit and a high adoption rate. Squads comprising informal leaders from offices nationwide rolled out templates to help investment teams adopt the practices, and the squads explained why and how the practices worked. Influential investment professionals in Goldman Sachs’s Private Wealth Management unit identified positive deviant practices among PWM’s most successful investment teams. To circumvent your company’s “immune system response,” introduce new practices into the mainstream gradually and collaboratively. New approaches to problems are often rejected by an organization. The practitioners shared their strategies for persuading clients to use condoms, enabling their colleagues to overcome their clients’ objections.Ĭonfound resistance to change. But when facilitators asked them to apply a condom to a banana, degrees of dexterity differentiated pretenders from practitioners. In a workshop devoted to curtailing HIV in the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar, prostitutes claimed they made clients use condoms.
Expose uncomfortable truths in compelling ways. Participants emphasize being candid and removing obstacles-not shooting messengers. Subgroups then delve into the issues and generate change strategies. For example, at a one-day workshop, key stakeholders critical to change read anonymous quotes from one another describing the company’s problems. Some companies use “organizational CAT scans” to surface “undiscussable” issues. Make them feel safe discussing taboos and exploring alternative solutions. Positive deviants may fear being attacked if their influence challenges others’ status. He bypassed high-priced celebrity players for less well-known players who nevertheless embodied winning statistics-transforming the A’s into a frequent title contender despite a meager budget. Instead, he mined baseball’s near-inexhaustible vein of statistics to identify factors-such as on-base percentage-most correlated with winning games. Example:īilly Beane, new manager of the struggling Oakland A’s, could have badgered the team’s owners for more recruiting dollars-had he assumed that winning teams require heavy spending on superstars. Instead, use hard data to identify the root causes of positive deviance. Avoid conventional assumptions about problems’ causes and solutions. His inquiry galvanized 100 engineers to collaborate on the problem, resulting in more reliable machines that saved millions for HP. He identified people scattered about HP’s global engineering fraternity who had independently dabbled in the problem and had developed prototypes. Inspired, one engineer decided to tackle a persistent problem: computer failures due to overheating. Example:Īt Hewlett-Packard, a research division program exposed some engineers to the concept of positive deviance. Facilitate the search for positive deviants, but let struggling groups own the quest for change. To leverage your positive deviants’ talents: Result? Doubling of average productivity per team. Goldman Sachs’s Private Wealth Management unit discovered this when it encouraged top-performing investment teams to share their practices across the unit.
Resist any urge to co-opt their practices and impose them yourself on struggling groups.Ĭhange from within-discovered, celebrated, and implemented by the people who need to do the changing-is a surefire way to bring isolated success strategies into your company’s mainstream. Identify them as the go-to guys-the problem solvers who have the answers. Make these deviants evangelists of their own innovative practices. Positive deviants might consist of a small cadre of engineers tackling a thorny technical problem, or a sales team scoring unusual successes with customers.
Hidden business problems how to#
How to fire up that enthusiasm? Help struggling groups identify your organization’s positive deviants: people who are already doing things in radically different-and better-ways. Why? Most leaders impose top-down change tactics-importing outside experts or “best” practices, which never generate the grassroots enthusiasm essential to drive enduring transformation. Some business problems-lackluster performance, escalating costs, interdepartmental conflict-persist no matter how hard companies try to fix them.
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