“It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than think your way into a new way of acting.”
-Richard Tanner Pascale
Do you ever get frustrated when you always hear ‘no’?! What about when you are in the position of always having to say ‘no?’
Containers like rules, bylaws and enforcement principles may seem rigid, but let’s be honest, they also provide us with a sense of safety!
How many times have you been relieved when encountering a complex problem or issue, and were secretly happy to hand it off because, ‘your hands are tied by legislation’, or ‘that’s not the scope of my role’, or ‘my department doesn’t handle this – here’s where you go…’ If we are honest with ourselves – there’s a bit of relief in this right?
I also know that for so many of you, as leaders, this can also be a source of moral distress – of pain even. You want to give back, you want to help someone in our community, you see the injustice of a situation and feel powerless to change this. These strictures can seem unnecessarily rigid and enhance your moral distress.
Let me start with a story: In 2007, I was working in Afghanistan for an international NGO helping girls who were imprisoned. Their ages ranged from 12-16. Their crimes? ‘Honour crimes.’ Girls who did not want to be married off at such a tender age to (usually) much older men who were often relatives. Girls who longed to continue their education, girls who wanted to fall in love with whomever they chose.
At the time, I was used to working in difficult cultural contexts and post war environments. I have seen almost everything having worked in Bosnia, Kosovo, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, and more. I could hold myself together and share, with honesty, when we had run out of resources and had to close field offices, or when there was no more food or medicine or supplies to distribute. But this situation unravelled me. A 12-year-old girl asking me what she should do from behind bars? In extreme cases, customary law might mean that the father or brother of this girl could kill her and the case would not be tried. Behind bars, she was ‘safe’, at least learning some skills and attending training we were offering in micro enterprise development. The prison was overseen by the then Department of Justice, which was being monitored by various UN agencies at the time because of the international presence in the region. She was getting regular food and access to some education.
How do you respond when you come from another world, where you’ve grown up with freedom, privilege and opportunity?
How do you respond when the choices available are not what you’d want for your client, your guest, the person eagerly seeking your services from a place of hope or despair?
I’ll share with you another story closer to home. In 2014 you may remember the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) pandemic that ravaged parts of West Africa. You may remember, with fear, when the first cases of medical workers were diagnosed in the US.
While working for a large health authority at that time, I served on our Emergency Operations Centre to plan for an outbreak in our region and prepare a new bio-containment unit to be set-up. Some of the most challenging aspects of the work were the ethical decisions that had to be made related to who might live, and who would die. A pregnant patient with EVD would not be able to be safety treated in labour and delivery. There was a quiet acknowledgement that neither she nor her child could be saved. Ethicists from our team were brought in to help us make difficult decisions around whether we would assign medical teams to treat outbreaks, or whether we ask for volunteers. (These care providers would not be able to go home to their families because the mortality rate at that time was 90%).
A less extreme example while working with doctors, nurses and care providers to improve our care and discharge planning processes, also illustrates the challenges of saying ‘no.’ I hear again, and again, how sick-to-their-stomachs it made good healthcare workers feel to discharge their patients into homelessness, or unsafe home situations. The ‘system’ requires that we discharge as quickly as possible to have the next bed ready for the next patient in need, because resources are limited, and we can’t block or hold beds from urgent cases because a patient has no where else to go.
So now, I’m imaging at this point, you are thinking, how do I generate opportunities for outsized impacts, when I’m constrained by rules, regulations and processes in complex systems?
Remember, the systems, the laws, the standard operating procedures – they are not bad in-and-of themselves. They are designed to keep you and your organization safe.
So Why “No” is the default? There are a number of very good reasons that include:
- Cognitive load
- Fear of setting precedent
- Risk aversion / fear of punishment
- Lack of clarity on what’s allowed
- Time pressure
- Emotional or change fatigue
But I’m here today to explore with you a slightly different conversation or shift in thinking. What if we explored, “How Might We?” By being open to this proposition, we:
- Open the brain’s problem-solving centres
- Create learning cultures
- Reduce defensiveness
- Signal partnership with those whose voices are usually in the margins
- Create micro-innovations
- Build trust with the public
I’m here to humanize the tension between rules that protect and rules that constrain and hopefully help you set the stage, in our exercises today, to shift from compliance mindset to possibility mindset.
I like to think of this as a little positive deviance. These are the ways you can support your community or organization that are a little less black and white, and a little more open to possibilities.
So what is positive deviance?
Pascale and Sternins define positive deviance as:
“…an approach that involves identifying and amplifying solutions already existing in the community, especially among those who are marginalized or poor, by encouraging them to adopt exceptional practices that have led to success in their situations.” (2010).
It’s a problem-solving approach based on behavioral and social change. Today, the concept is applied in various fields, such as public health, education, business management, and criminology.
Basically, it relies of Collective Intelligence. Positive deviance believes in collective intelligence – not merely the leaders or the experts of the community. Instead, it is spread throughout the group inspired to make a change. Positive deviance employs this collective intelligence to solve problems. It’s one of those beautifully counter intuitive approaches. Instead of starting from a place of deficits, it asks who is already succeeding against the odds—and what can we learn from them? In community development, it often reveals quiet innovators whose behaviours, relationships, or micro practices create outsized impact.
Examples of positive deviance in community development include:
Social cohesion in community settings.
- In areas with high crime, certain blocks remained safe in Cape Town.
- Residents had informal night watch rotations, shared childcare, and strong neighbour to neighbour accountability.
- These hyper local practices were replicated in broader community safety programs.
Indigenous youth leadership in remote Canadian communities.
- Some young people were thriving academically and culturally despite systemic barriers according to youth-engagement research.
- Their success was linked to land based learning, intergenerational mentorship, and community driven governance roles. These enhanced cultural identify, a sense of belonging and community-driven leadership pathways.
- These practices informed culturally grounded youth engagement models and increased youth resilience and leadership.
*EG: Sayisi Dene First Nation (Tadoule Lake, Manitoba) and Biigtigong Nishnaabeg First Nation (Ontario).
HIV prevention programs in East Africa
- Some sex workers were found to have significantly lower HIV rates.
- Researchers found they insisted on condom use, negotiated differently with clients, and formed peer support networks.
- These behaviours were scaled into community led HIV prevention strategies in Tanzania and expanded across East Africa.
A month ago, I introduced the idea of a ‘no autopsy’ to support cultural shifts within my local municipality. Staff felt the impact of rules, bylaws and enforcement measures who wanted to work with the community to make a difference. Through a series of facilitated exercises, we explored how to shift mindsets from compliance and enforcement towards the notion of possibilities.
Regardless of the sector you are in, here are a few lessons we learned that you could consider when constrained by barriers:
- Explore language shifts: How can we move from, “We can’t do that” to “Here’s what we can explore together?”
- Explore what options exist within the rules, and what options exist outside the rules within discretion. What is the client trying to achieve? What could be co-created together? Who else can we leverage as support?
- Bring in the experiences of those in the margins. Often those who are most impacted by a problem we are trying to address, have the least voice in developing the solutions. Forget the ‘expert’ and listen to the wisdom of those who have the lived experience.
- Seek solutions within the margins. There are countless examples of small groups of dedicated individuals who created outsized impacts in their communities through local collaboration and ingenuity.
- Consider what can we take forward in the immediate term and test? How will we know we are succeeding?
- What have we learned? What patterns are we observing as we take the first steps? What worked, failed, or surprised us? What is our next wise action?
Take a moment to reflect upon a situation where a small change, or a solution from the margins, created an outsized impact. Let me know in the comments and let’s share the learning.
What is ONE SHIFT you will make towards approaching complex challenges with a spirit of positive deviance?
