Healthy Baby Stories

The WE Program has its own language, a metaphorical shorthand that allows us to talk simply about complex subjects. At term you hear a lot in the WE Program is healthy baby.

“What healthy baby stories have we identified?”

“How can we support this healthy baby in this factory?”

“I’m really excited about how this healthy baby is growing!”

Like me, you might be surprised to learn that originally, this concept was referring to actual healthy babies. The term emerged from medical research in the 1960s on the existence of healthy children in very poor communities with high levels of malnutrition. This research was used as the basis for an initiative in the early 1990s led by the Vietnamese government to support millions of families in Vietnam to raise healthy babies. The concept has since gone global, as part of the Positive Deviance Initiative.?

These healthy babies are examples of positive deviance, when something good happens despite difficult conditions. I remember once, a few years ago, I went to visit a dear friend of mine. She had recently given birth to a son, not exactly something she had planned to ever do. I wasn’t sure what to expect…and then I got to hold him for the first time. He was so tiny, with these huge eyes. Endless pools that I found myself completely lost in, as the uncertainty and chaos around us sort of melted away. He felt so alive in my arms, and I more so for just being next to him.?

I often think of this moment when I run into healthy baby stories in the wild and believe this an essential step to understand them: just stop and be within the moment. Enjoy the rare opportunity to see something truly beautiful. Then, when you are ready, turn your brain back on and start looking for the differences that make a difference.?

In the original study on child health these differences were parenting practices: avoiding power struggles at the dinner table, letting the child control the length of feeding, and no sweets between meals. It is difficult, even impossible, to see these differences by looking at just one healthy baby. Understanding deviance requires a collection of stories to compare. Even better when you can compare the growth of several babies with stories and measurements over a period of time.?

This brings us back the WE Program, and our own language, which is entirely devoid of anything related to measurement. There are good reasons why it has developed this way, but Caroline Rennie and I are also exploring where we might add measurements back into our work in a safe and meaningful way. For us, that means exploring our set of stories, which are stored centrally in Oasis. When a story is added to Oasis, we collect some data about each story from the author, including how it made them feel and how common it is. Using this data, we can quickly find positive deviations in our collection. The data doesn’t automatically make a story a healthy baby story, but it’s a good first step in the search for meaningful patterns amongst hundreds of stories.

It’s important to note that these patterns are not ‘best practices’ that we can just bring and dump onto another community. Every situation is different, and what works for one factory, probably won’t work for another. Instead, when we work to spread positive deviance, we are aiming to grow the culture of finding, caring for, and understanding healthy babies wherever they may arise. Caroline recently told me: “You have to look for healthy babies with intention. Look for what you want to create and see if that is already there.”