Positive Deviance Approach
A strengths-based approach that looks for people or groups already achieving unusually good outcomes despite facing similar constraints to others.
Positive Deviance Collaborative
This page is a plain-English practice summary. It attributes the source field and avoids presenting the framework as Positively Devious intellectual property.
What this framework helps with
- finding practical wisdom already present in a community
- designing learning around uncommon success rather than imported fixes
- asking what conditions make good outcomes possible
Three questions it helps teams ask
- Who is doing unusually well despite similar constraints?
- What are they doing differently in observable, practical terms?
- Which behaviours or conditions can others realistically test?
How to use it in youth and community work
Use Positive Deviance Approach as a lens for better decisions, not as a script. Start with the local context, invite the people affected by the work into the interpretation, and turn the framework into practical questions, design choices and learning habits.
For Positively Devious, this framework matters because it helps explain one part of the wider conditions around positive deviance: the relationships, opportunities, skills, systems and power arrangements that make uncommon positive outcomes more likely to be noticed and learned from.
What to watch out for
- do not romanticise hardship or imply people are responsible for structural barriers
- do not copy behaviours without understanding context
- avoid turning a discovery process into a top-down campaign