The Power of Positive Deviance: What Outliers Can Teach Us About Transforming Communities
Date:
October 18, 2010 - 15:30 - 18:00
Building:
Nador u. 9, Monument Building Room:
Popper Room Event type:
Seminar Event audience:
Open to the Public External presenter(s):
Mark Munger, Senior Associate of Positive Deviance Initiative, Tufts University External presenter(s):
Lars Thuesen, Director of Development, Department of Prison and Probation Services, Ministry of Justice, Denmark CEU presenter(s):
John Shattuck CEU host unit(s):
Rectorate CEU contact person:
Noemi Kakucs Two of the leading experts in this new field at the cutting edge of behavioral science will deliver a seminar at CEU. Positive Deviance is a formula for systemic change based on the observation that in every community there are individuals and groups whose uncommon behaviors and strategies enable them to find better solutions to problems than their peers, while having access to the same resources and facing similar or worse constraints and challenges. Some chronic social problems which have significant costs are historic, such as childhood malnutrition. Others are resurgent—for example, youth violence. Still others are emergent—hospital-acquired infections from which more than one hundred thousand people in the US die annually. Positive Deviance has been used in a wide variety of circumstances to address and solve, in a sustained manner, such behavioral and social problems. Often, the solutions are invisible to the larger community. Once discovered, they can be employed by many, without generating resistance often associated with top-down, expert-driven problem solving.