Welcome to another episode of the Meridian Point. I believe we're up to episode 110. And today, I'm joined by my business partner, Michael Jebber and good friend, to explore an intriguing approach to problem solving and innovation. So recently, Michael wrote a blog post called "Positive Deviance." I was gonna say defiance, but it's not defiance. It's deviance. And positive deviance is about how this method is about amplifying what's working well in your organization compared to maybe something like traditional root cause analysis. And what we'll do is we'll discuss these two approaches to continuous improvement and discuss why he believes positive deviance deserves more attention in business and how it can transform organizational culture.
So, Michael, without further ado, it's been a while since we had the whole gang here, but let me get you on the stage. And, welcome to the show.
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Let me start with the first question. It's a great article, by the way. I read it this afternoon, and apologies for not reading it sooner because I know your work is always top-notch. So in this article, you discussed these two approaches, right? Positive deviance and root cause analysis. Can you sort of explain these concepts, and how they differ in their approach to addressing challenges, you know, continuous improvement, things like that?
So, yeah, it's very interesting. I learned about positive deviance. I was first introduced to it after I'd learned a course that I was facilitating for one of the universities on leadership. And it's very interesting because I always knew that this was kind of a way to think about approaching problem-solving, but I never really understood that there was a fully blown concept out there with this. So I kind of did some more deep diving on it and learned that this positive deviance concept has been around for quite a while. And while root cause analysis is pretty popular and pretty well known, positive deviance, I found, is not. Hence, I haven't been using it even though I've been using root cause analysis for well over 20 years.
What's interesting is they can work very well together, and they're very complementary. One of the things around positive deviance is it's really about approaching problem-solving from that positive mindset. It's about taking an approach towards looking at what's working well somewhere and then trying to understand why it's working well and then take that and actually try and replicate that somewhere else.
The case study that I saw and reviewed was a case study that was done back in the nineties. It was a couple that was working for a health organization and they were going to Vietnam and they were actually looking at villages where malnutrition was really high in the young children and the young adults in these certain villages. And while they were kind of looking at the reasons why, traditional root cause would say, well, let's dive down into this and figure out what are the root causes as to why their health is so poor. Positive deviance kind of looked at it and said, you know what? Why don't we go to the villages where the children are doing really well? And let's look and see what they're doing, and let's try and replicate that. We can take that to the other villages and see where there's a miss, where there's a disconnect. And they had a huge amount of success on improving the nutritional situations for children and young adults in those villages that were struggling. And this was a prime example of positive deviance, going out and looking for what works and actually taking the elements of that and then comparing it to other areas that need improvement and finding out where those differences are and injecting the things that were working in the other place.
That's fascinating. So it seems like with positive deviance, it's looking at the positive aspects of something, and what we're most used to is root cause analysis which is, there's a problem. Let's go RCA that problem and figure out what some of the root causes might be to that problem and go fix it. Right? And that's a very common approach that comes from lean, you know, we use it in agile and so on and so forth. I suppose though you could use RCA for positive things. Right? Do you ever see that happening?
That's very interesting that you asked that. This is a question that I've asked more than 1000 people over the last, probably over 10 years, as I run into people because it's just something interesting to me and especially when there's an after-action report situation or when there's a root cause analysis or somebody is getting ready to do something like that. And I see companies or organizations struggling with this. I'll ask different leaders and different members of the organization. The question I've always asked was, have you ever done an RCA on something that was wildly successful? And out of over 1000 people, no one has been able to go, you know what? There was this one thing, and we took a different approach on this, and it was amazing. I mean, it was we had this amazing result, and then we took it and we broke it down and we tried it again somewhere else, and we had another major success. No one said that. In fact, most people kind of would do this and they think about it a while and then they'd start to smile and they're like, no. We've never done that. In fact, we never even thought about doing that because in most cases, the experience I think that a lot of us have had is that in my one company, we used to call it root cause analysis was called root canal analysis because it was always done on something that was a problem, like a big fire, big issue. Something broke down. So it's like, we're having an RCA tomorrow. It's like, yeah. Okay. It's weaponized. Right? You get people get blamed, people get fired. All these things happen. And a lot of times, you discover things, and then you never even implement the things that you discover that you wanna try to do, or you end up with this 4000 page list of don't dos over 20 years at a company that creates a bureaucracy and a process that's almost archaic and hard to get through. So people's experience, they tend to be like they don't want to do RCAs. They won't because there's not a lot of good attached to it.
You could absolutely use RCA to dive down in and find the root causes for something that happens well. But companies never choose to use it for that. If you think about the two approaches, you can blend these two mindsets together and use some of the tactical approaches together, and you could come up with a pretty good blend, a pretty good result. But you don't see people thinking about positive deviance and applying it in a root cause analysis pattern, fishbones, 5 whys, using all the techniques. Yeah. And trying to do that. You don't see that very often.
Yeah. And for those of you who are maybe not familiar with RCA root cause analysis, it's really sort of asking enough whys to get to the root of a problem. You know, something goes wrong or something... I'm saying it too, right, something goes wrong. It could be something goes right. That's what we think of. Right?
Yeah. Exactly. It could be something goes right. Right? And you wanna get to the reason why it was right. What was the cause of that rightness or wrongness, in the research that you're doing? And so you ask enough whys to get to the root. There's lots of reasons why, but the real root could be something as simple as, you know, the bolt wasn't tightened all the way on the assembly line, machine that does x, y, or z. You know, and so you get to that root cause, you tighten the bolt, and all these other reasons for being wrong go away. And, to your point, I can see how the positive deviance method could be applied, or it could be... root cause analysis could be applied in the same way. What would you say are the strengths of each of these approaches, Mike, and where would you use one over the other? Or would you?
I think, you know, when you think about the positive deviance, it's proactive. Right? You're going after and trying to replicate something great, something that's working well. There's a psychological benefit to that. We all know the psychological drawback to root cause the way it's traditionally used. People don't wanna do it. They don't wanna be involved, and they wanna get through it as fast as possible because it's painful, which means it's probably not as effective as it could be if people were fully engaged, right, with that.
The limitations... some of the limitations on the positive deviance side, you could potentially overlook a root cause. Right? This is why the two of them together kinda make nice partners, because if you're kind of just going in and saying, well, this looks good and this looks good and this looks good with it. You might be taking some of the outcomes but not understanding the symptoms, and then you try to replicate that and you don't necessarily get... you don't get the same result. Right? So that's kind of a drawback of the positive deviance side.
You know, the root cause, it's... there's a committed approach. Right? You can follow it. It's a pattern. It's nice. You typically get to real causes, and you typically get to ones that are more impactful. But the drawback from that is you do go very specific. So you may get down there and say, here's the root cause, and then you go to fix that and you don't see the improvement that you were expecting because maybe there are 3 or 4 or 5 or there are other ancillary things that because you drove down so specific that you're not seeing a wide enough picture to understand some of the implications or the other impacts.
Yeah. Things that are impacting what's going on. Right. This approach, positive deviance, reminds me of, you know, in one-on-one coaching, executive coaching, whatever you wanna call it. There's this notion that, you know, coaches help you fix the deficiencies that you have, you know, personality, work, whatever it might be. And so you get a coach to fix yourself. And there's another group of thought that says, no, you are who you are, let's focus on your strengths and make them stronger. And so it's, there's a book written about it, "The Positive Intelligence" by Shirzad Chamine that talks about focusing on your strengths, and by doing so, you diminish your saboteurs or your weaknesses, if you will. Right? And there's a whole strengths finder thing. Right? There's assessments built around that to focus on your strengths and not so much on your deficiencies. And I wonder if this is similar to that, that, yes, maybe sometimes you do need to look at root causes of the problems that you have. But more often than not, maybe focusing on your strengths is a good approach. What are your thoughts?
Absolutely. And, really, when you think about what we do, what we do at Agile Meridian, you know, we hone in on creating environments that create the type of atmosphere that will allow everyone to use their strengths and to highlight those strengths and then to be able to leverage those strengths. We hear all the time about people that, companies do a very good job of finding great talent. We see it all the time. And I think of it. They go out, they find the talent, they find these unicorns, they find these amazing people, and then they box them into their system. And then they wonder why those people aren't producing the types of amazing outcomes that they thought they would produce. Right? Or maybe that they produce somewhere else. And we talk about environments and creating those environments. Well, creating an environment that allows for individuals and teams to accentuate their strengths and then use their strengths in ways and creative ways that maybe you can't think of at the time is a huge part of trying to do exactly what you're talking about. But it's actually a tactical way to do it, and it impacts culture. You'll create cultures by doing it through environments. Yeah. But it's definitely that idea of we want to focus on creating something or giving the opportunity for our talent to take and leverage their strengths and to use them to help our organization and to help them improve their careers and everything else. So definitely, I think that has a lot to do with it.
You know, as I was reminiscing about when I was a scrum master some odd number of years ago, and I used to, every 3rd or 4th sprint, use this approach. I didn't know it had a name. Right. But I would use this approach with the team and ask them to think about all the great things that they were able to accomplish. And I didn't use root cause analysis. It was just sort of like an open discussion as to why they were so successful, what made it successful, and how they could replicate those great things that happened, those great successes. And as I recall, those are probably the most productive and fun, engaging retrospectives that I was ever a part of. And I wonder if you're onto something here. You know? Why doesn't positive deviance have more of a role in organizational culture and change? What is your opinion, and how would maybe companies use this more frequently?
Well, from what I've seen and from talking with a lot of CEOs, presidents, senior leaders, that when I first meet them, usually, it's a situation where they just... there's no time. They're firefighting. They're doing these other things. There's so many... As one of my executives used to say, we have these problems, and they're so consuming, and they're consuming all of our time. So we spend all of our time trying to fight these problems. But they don't have a pattern of a way to approach things in a more positive manner. Their pattern is firefighting. It's about things coming into their system and having to deal with them as a fire instead of having the opportunity to look at things and go out and proactively be moving something in a direction that prevents these types of things from happening.
That's right. So, you know, that we... I have seen a lot of them achieve it, though. When they first work with us, they don't have that capability, but they do have that capability when they've gotten to the point where they can get some of the other things to a dull roar, get a pattern and a cadence to helping their talent and their people start to look at things and look at opportunities to start building and growing and improving. When those things start making it into the daily conversations, and I even have a strategic leadership group I'm working with right now. The second thing we do every meeting, every Thursday that we meet, we meet for 2 hours, first half hour's like covering and syncing, and then we go and break out and do certain strategic things. But the second thing that we do every week is wins, wins for the week. We talk about what those wins are and just generating that positive mindset.
And one of the things about positive deviance, one of the reasons that I think that it can be so powerful is there's a lot of psychological benefit. Yeah. And you might have experienced this when you did this on your once every 4. Right? The psychological benefit, the enjoyment, the eagerness, the willingness of everybody to, I know from my strategic group. Now everybody's looking for things each week to bring to the table to say, hey. I got one. My so-and-so got this win. Right? It's just this... it's a different... it's just a completely complete 180 from what folks are usually having to meet about. People are using meetings about problems. Now we're meeting about doing something amazing. Right? Doing something incredible.
I had someone on the show several weeks ago. I forget his name, but he is a sales leader, sales coach, and he's describing a practice that they have in their company. The company, it's called the 5 on 5. And it's basically spend 5 minutes every week and think of 5 things that you did well or that you accomplished or whatever. Right? No more than 5 minutes. Write it down. Send an email to whatever the distro is, I guess, the whole company. And every Friday, this thing goes out and everyone celebrates and there are 5 successes, which shouldn't take them more than 5 things to write. And I thought that was fantastic advice. Right? So it's focusing on the positive things that happened rather than, I mean, we can always find things that are wrong. I think it's maybe a little harder to find things that are right. And ever since I talked to him, I started to, I haven't started doing it consistently yet, but every Friday I try to do that. Write five things that I accomplished that, you know, that contributed to success in some way, and it's hard. It is really hard. And I wonder, you know, if you have 100 problems, 100 fires to put out, and you have 2 or 3 great things that happen, what are you gonna focus on? Yeah. And how would you get an organization to start focusing on the good when there's a 100 bad things that need attention right away?
Well, I think, you know, it's funny you made me think of something else. You know how we when we work with our clients, we talk about... we have the concept called emptying the glass. Right? The whole idea in emptying the glass is essentially allowing someone if your glass is full with problems, right, it's all the way full to the top, and you got no room for anything new. Trying to talk about... let's talk about some positive... there's no space for it. Right? It just... it's hitting the glass. It's overflowing out of the table. It doesn't make it in. So people need room in their glass for something new. And if we want it to be something positive. Right? So but that means they need to spend a little time emptying the glass. And, you know, we have this concept. We have these techniques that we do and everything else.
And the interesting thing is, I had a class, one of the leadership classes I was teaching, 2 weeks ago. And one of the attendees, she works for the IRS. So there's a lot of stress there. Right? A lot of stress. But she had this awesome concept that I don't know if anybody has ever done this before, but she had what she called the Vegas room. And she had an open door policy with all of her people. And she's seen a huge change in the amount of time that all of her people and herself work and talk about positive things and positive change since she started doing this Vegas room. And the Vegas room is kind of what it sounds like. If, you know, everything that happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. So essentially, the idea is that you can come in to this room, have a conversation and just kind of get it all out on the table. Lay everything out and well, we call it emptying the glass, and you're opening up space so that now when you do get together, there's less negativity and there's room for something new.
So that's when you start to have the opportunity. Now, obviously, when you start tackling problems, you start getting them out of the way, which happens a little farther down the road usually with these... with what we do with helping folks, you start to see that happen. But to get it started, sometimes you just need that some kind of a technique or a way that you can get your folks into emptying the glass, making that space, having less of that glass full of, let's call it, polluted or not so... not so great tasting stuff, and then having that space to put in something a whole lot more sweeter and more enjoyable.
Yeah. I love that. I mean, we do that as part of our disruptor method, the emptying the glass technique. Right? And we... I love their Vegas room, though. It was a great way to kinda create an environment that was fun and everybody... it created a lot of psychological safety because they're like, okay. I need to see in the Vegas room. It's almost like a keyword. It's like and whatever said there, it stays there, and it gives an outlet for people to get rid of this stuff, to have it come out with some psychological safety. They build trust. They build these things, and it just starts to parlay into this more positive mindset. And people are more interested and willing to talk about and work on positive things when they're in a more positive mood. It's just... that's the psychology and sociology of it all. So Yeah. No. I get it. I get it.
What do you think, Mike, are some steps that an organization can take to implement positive deviance facilitation techniques, whatever you wanna call it. Right? So this sort of this method, into their culture.
I think balancing it out, if you can find when you get your next win, break it down. Spend time on breaking it down. We all of us that we've experienced, a lot of us in our past, we go and we do a win, and what do we do? We go, yay. We made it. We crossed the line, we made it on time, on budget. Nice job. Okay. What's next? We're way behind. We got so much work to do, and we don't spend any time on that. So Yeah. Spending a little bit of time and actually taking something that we don't like doing, like an RCA and saying, let's do a root cause on something great. I mean, because that's something that you could do immediately. Now that happens when something good... when you've achieved something that you can actually break down. But until you get to that point, certainly doing something like a Vegas room or giving certain things that you can do right now to help your individuals on your teams to empty the glass and to have more space and less toxic material in their glass, that you can do without even having a win.
So you can start to work on that first. Then as you get wins, start breaking them down, but also look at, what are some of the things that we wanted to do that we believe we can do even... what you did with your retrospectives? Going through and saying, what were the wins? How can you build upon those wins? Now what was it that you did? How can we apply that someplace else? Anything you've got going on that you can grab that's positive, spend a little time and focus on it. People will value... they spend time on the things they value. And if they see you spending time on it, they know that you value those things, and they will start to value them too. But they need to see consistency. If you haven't had a positive environment for a long time, it's gonna take more time of them seeing you work this way for them to believe and get the psychological safety to say, okay. So this is okay. It's safe to go do this. I can actually do this. But I think those are two things you could do right off the bat. And I love what you did with your retros. I think that's perfect because that's something that happens frequently that you can start to have little wins happen a lot and start to get that positive mindset going in a repetitious way.
Yeah. I think anything forward-looking, future-looking can be more positive than backward-looking. And the thing that we did with one of our clients, Mike, the futurespective, where we had them start to think about the future, a great future, a perfect future for that organization. And to have them imagine that whatever that perfect future look like for them, for these individuals, and then work their way back from that perfect ending, if you will, or that perfect destination, and all the things that they did to get there. I think that may be also an example of this approach, this positive approach to think in terms of being more proactive and more positive, more sort of, forward-looking, forward-thinking than dwelling too much on the mistakes of the past. What do you...
As leaders, you need to show that you want to, and it's valuable to spend time on positive things. Yeah. You need to set that example as a leader. In fact, you need to be able to tune your environment that you get to spend some time on that stuff. There's always going to be problems. There's always gonna be fires. But the more proactive time you get and what I've seen is leaders that spend time on this and commit to spending time on this early in the times that we have engagements start to have fewer fires faster in their organization. They start to eliminate fires quicker because what they're doing now is they're giving their people the opportunity to look for ways to prevent fires from starting in their organization. And that's a win. People feel very positive about not having to firefight anymore. If you can absolutely focus on those things, people start to get it, and it's got real benefits real fast.
What have I not asked you, Mike, about this topic that you'd like to share?
I think it's pretty good coverage. You know, check out the blog that we've got on our website. Read through it. There's a lot on the web, more than I was surprised how much there was around positive deviance in some of the applications that have been used. And it's exciting to know that there's a way to approach work that is not negative. Right? Yeah. That it's motivating. It's inspiring. It's exciting. It's adventurous. You're kind of working... you're working into the unknown, but you're not working in it to avoid a minefield. You're working in it to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It's so much fun. It's a lot of enjoyment, and it's very productive. It's... you can metrically measure the improvement in time and money in your organization, and you can also measure the lowering of stress, the improvement in collaboration amongst peers and amongst team members, and how that collaboration and communication turns into consistency, predictability, innovation, all of these things. It's very measurable, very measurable, as a leader. But it takes that leadership's willingness to go a little bit right when everybody's going left, to set this up, and it's gonna feel very strange for a lot of people. But, when they see you commit to it and they see you commit hard to it and you're willing to invest some time in it, you'll find that there are folks that are willing to go with you.
I imagine that if a leader starts to say, okay, what are the great things that happened? Let's examine them. People are gonna probably look at him or her as if they're crazy, but it's gonna catch their attention. Right? They're gonna be more engaged because it's different. It's like who asked that question? Or maybe not that many people do. When we got all these problems going on, how can you even talk about this? How can you think about this? Okay. That's the point. It's like you're always gonna have problems. If they're consistent and insistent about it, both consistent and insistent about, hey. We're gonna inject this into what we do, and we're gonna do it on a weekly basis, right, on a daily basis, whatever that is. It's gotta be some frequency to it. It can't just be an annual meetings or quarterly review.
That's right. It's gotta be on your weekly work stuff.
Yeah. Alright. Well, I think we've covered it. I'll include a link for those of you watching or listening to this, to the blog post that Mike wrote. Please check it out. Give us a like. Please subscribe to our channel, and we'll see you at the next episode. Thanks for watching.
Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Kumar.
