Positive Deviance: The Key to Real Diversity Best Practices

by Joe Santana | Diversity Executive

 

Over the years, the phrase "best practice" has almost become a cliche - a shorthand label meant to represent a fail-proof way of doing things. Yet time and again, we hear stories of people who claim to be executing best practices but who cannot point to tangible, positive results.

 

The diversity space is no different. There are volumes of so-called diversity best practices for people to learn and copy, many of which earned the title by producing a winning result for a specific company and thereby gaining renown. But in private, many diversity best-practice copiers will confide that these magic recipes learned from books, seminars and colleagues have done little to advance whatever metrics they happen to be watching.

 

This lack of real best-practice outcomes is neither confined to diversity nor surprising when we consider that unless a result can be created through a controlled formula, a best practice is merely a set of steps that worked for someone, somewhere, at some point. This does not guarantee those same steps will work the same way elsewhere at another point in time.

 

A certain way of doing a math formula or running a computer program will always produce the expected result. But there is no portable best practice for, say, managing human resources or diversity that will produce an identical result every time. Due to differences in context, what works somewhere else, even for a close competitor, often does not work the same way in another organization.

 

Further, even if learned and copied best practices do produce the exact result in your company that they yielded in the past, that won't make you competitive in engaging your workforce, attracting new talent or securing business, due to diminishing value over time. As Oscar Berg explains in his blog The Content Economy, "By the time a best practice has been transferred from one company to another, it's more likely no longer a 'best practice.' In a static world, maybe, but not in the world we live in. At best, it will be a 'great' practice, but more likely it will just be a 'good' practice. And as it is transferred to more and more companies, it will eventually turn into a 'common' practice, which can mean anything from great to bad - it's just something a lot of companies use."

 

So what can an organization do to create best practices that produce real competitive results? It must innovate. The two tips that follow are designed to get you started.

 

1. Use other companies' practices as inspiration, not templates.

Instead of looking at what others are doing with an eye to simply copying it, seek to understand why and how the solution worked for them and come up with ways to produce superior results through similar or different steps. For example, if a particular company has a great solution for hiring women engineers, find out how and why it works in their company. Ask yourself how your company is similar and different and what you'll need to come up with an even better approach. Mix and match ideas from other disciplines or companies. Innovators don't just collect facts and apply logic. They ask "what if" questions and use their imaginations to create new ideas.

 

2. Look for extraordinary but rare performance within your own organization, and turn that into the norm.

After years of failed attempts to address childhood malnutrition in Vietnam by introducing external best practices that did not stick, Kerry Sternin and his wife Monique Sternin successfully applied an approach called Positive Deviance (PD) to identify and spread locally developed solutions. Essentially, PD operates on the premise that within every group - whether a village or a company - there are a small number of people whose special attitudes , practices, strategies or behaviors enable them to meet objectives more effectively than others with the exact same resources under identical conditions. The goal in PD is to isolate those positive differences, propagate them to others and make them the group norm, resulting in an overall increase in performance.

 

True best practices in diversity today are like many other things in our competitive society - they have a short shelf life and can only succeed within a specific and changing context. Therefore, to continue to successfully leverage and manage diversity, practitioners need to be creative innovators who continuously raise the stakes to overcome the growing challenges around them.

 

 

[About the Author: Joe Santana is senior director of diversity at Siemens USA.]

 

Regards,

Harvinder