Hi! I thought you might be interested in a very intriguing conference coming up in Boston in June This 'positive deviance' approach shares a lot of theoretical roots with appreciative inquiry and complexity frameworks and I think is very aligned with some of our thinking in open space too!
>From the Inside Out: Uncovering Solutions to Intractable Problems through Positive Deviance Tufts University, Boston, MA June 28-29, 2005 http://www.plexusinstitute.org Positive Deviance, an approach developed over the past fourteen years, demonstrates that isolated examples of success can be tapped to benefit an entire community or organization. Accomplishing this requires a radical departure from benchmarking and best practice strategies of change. Plexus Institute and The Positive Deviance Initiative at Tufts University invite you to explore Positive Deviance with Jerry and Monique Sternin, leading Positive Deviance (PD) authorities and pioneers, and Arvind Singhal, a scholar-practitioner on social change, and join with others who are searching for solutions to some of the critical social and organizational challenges facing us today. The PD approach builds on successful but deviant (different) practices that are identified from within a community or organization. It is based on the observation that in every group there are certain individuals whose uncommon, but demonstrably successful practices or behaviors enable them to find better solutions than their neighbors or colleagues who have access to exactly the same resources. It use was pioneered in developing countries and has led to sustainable improvements in seemingly intractable organizational and social issues. The Harvard Business Review features PD in its May 1, 2005 edition. The approach has also begun to penetrate the corporate consciousness. It was employed at Goldman Sachs and was instrumental in transforming the behavior and practice of its nationwide force of investment advisors. It has been used to tackle gnarly technical challenges at Hewlett Packard, and hospitals have begun to use PD to address quality improvement challenges. And a PD workshop was just held at the January 2005 World Economic Forum in Davos. PD is unlike traditional expert-driven models for social and organizational change. Like the human immune system, individuals and institutions reject what is perceived as foreign matter. When experts provide best practice strategies for organizational changes, which are externally identified, and not invented from within, they face rejection. The Positive Deviance approach provides an antidote to the immune system defense mechanism; the solution and the host share the same DNA and the change comes from within. Those in a community or organization are helped to discover the positive deviants in their midst, understand the strategies they employ and then create among themselves a process for enrolling the larger community in the desired change. Change is from inside out. This workshop will provide an overview of how and where PD has been successfully used to address problems requiring social or behavioral change. All participants will learn the 4 steps of the PD process design to nurture a PDbased change initiative on an issue of importance to them. Id be happy to share more info if youre interested! * lisa Lisa kimball Group Jazz, Suite 440 5335 Wisconsin Ave NW Washington, DC 20015 USA P: +1 202.686.4848 F: +1 202.966.3772 E: l...@groupjazz.com www.groupjazz.com * * ========================================================== osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
