Uncertainty, turbulence, chaos; these words keep ringing when speaking of the business environment these days. The worst seemed to have been over after the collective business hibernation, which followed September 11. Business confidence was slowly returning when the newspapers again started raising the bogie of war, putting business back to slumber. Be it due to the political climate, technology shifts or competition from unknown sources, or changes in the industry structure, uncertainty in the business landscape seems to be the only certainty in business.

Traditional management methods rely a lot on the predictability of outcomes, based on the mechanistic / scientific view of the world. That this view has serious limitations is fairly evident from what happens to plans and strategies in practice. Just the other day I was chatting with an entrepreneur whose product was launched a year ago. He recalled that in the planning stage they drew up a list of 20 companies who they thought would definitely buy their product. They had even got an in-principle nod from these prospects and it was based on this confidence in expected business that they launched their product.

One year later this company has over a hundred customers but only 3 from the initial wish list of 20. There goes the predictability in business. I am sure people who have seen many a business season would echo this disconnect between plans and actual outcomes. However there seems to be some correlation between intention and the outcome. My entrepreneur friend still got a 100 customers though they were different from whom he intended. The exact bridge, which connects intention and outcome most probably, may not have been what was initially planned.

Unpredictability is very fundamental to business, which means that there needs to be some business method which one can use not only to cope with uncertainty but also harness the power of it. I present to you one wonderful concept that is fundamentally grounded in the uncertainty assumption, the concept of Positive Deviance. The practicality of this concept is really brought out in what happened in Vietnam after the war. The devastated economy there resulted in scores of children in Vietnam being undernourished. Now imagine that you are heading a charitable organisation and want to help these undernourished children, what would you have done? A typical reaction would be to set up base, in the villages of Vietnam and distribute food, organise health camps, canvas for more aid and educate the mothers on good food and the “best practices” of mothers world wide.

Monique and Jerry Stern who were in a charitable foundation however applied a different approach, a model called “Positive Deviance” developed by the Tufts University.

Instead of arriving as experts with answers the Sterns came as catalysts with questions, determined to tap local wisdom. They set up camp in a village and surveyed all the children in the village, children from poor as well as rich families. They measured the children’s nutritional status and studied it. It turned out the better-nourished children (the positive deviants) were not necessarily from rich families. Then the Sterns went back to the mothers of the “positive deviants” and observed what these mothers fed their children. The idea is to find out what unconventional “deviant” practices the better performers do, which is different from convention or the accepted norm. The answer was there. These exceptional mothers were supplementing their children’s normal rice based diet with fresh water shrimp and crabs and vitamin rich sweet potato leaves.

All items which were abundantly available in the village, yet not part of a typical diet. They were also feeding their children more frequently. Armed with this discovery the Sterns embarked on the next step of the plan to coax other villagers to change the eating habits of their children. This was done by making the “exceptional or deviant” mothers heroes. These mothers were asked to speak to other mothers on how they cooked and fed their children and then coaxed them to get used to a new meal. The whole initiative was a resounding success within six months two thirds of the children gained weight.

Then the Sterns took their initiative to another village. Now what do you think they did in the next village? Start the children on a diet of fresh water shrimp and crabs and vitamin rich sweet potato leaves? Well no, they started with the first step “Discover”, and then decipher and propagate. One important aspect of “positive deviance” is that the wisdom to solve problems exists and needs to be discovered within each community or coming back to context each business.

Lets see how this could be applied to a sales team of say 20 people. The first task would be to measure data in various parameters, sales numbers, customer type by size, industry, time spent with customers, sales approach to customers, etc. etc. and then looks for positive deviance. What are the champion sales persons doing differently, or for a particular sales person what type of sales approach or customer is giving the best results. After the positive deviance is discovered the idea would be to coax others to try the discovery out, or for a sales person to find his kind of customers and apply his positive deviant method more often.

This concept of “Positive Deviance” and the process of discovery and replication could be applied in various arenas, from getting better performance, to looking at business models.

This concept could be extended to a corporate strategy level by having a Portfolio of Initiatives. This concept is echoed in a Mc. Kinsey Quarterly article called “The Just in Time Strategy for a turbulent world”. Since predictability of outcomes in an uncertain world is so difficult, the idea behind this concept is to initiate a lot of experiments in an organisation and then let these evolve. Some of these initiatives would give extraordinary results. Identify these initiatives and then replicate them. So at any given point of time, there might be a number of experiments being undertaken, each initiative at a different stage of evolution. This framework could be applied for new products or services, new businesses, or business processes.

In a turbulent business landscape, the one essential element, which would help the business prosper, is having a healthy profit margin. This is the only cushion, which will take the shocks that businesses are bound to face. The concepts of Positive Deviance and Portfolio of Initiatives are two methods by which profitability paths can be identified in this uncertain world.

(This reprint of The Spark has been chosen for its relevance to this issue. The author is the Chief Catalyst of businessgyan. His areas of interest are business strategy and innovation. Mail to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Issue BG45 Dec04

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