Positively Deviant

I learned the power of positive deviants early in my Continuous Improvement career through one of my first coaches. He told the story of an improvement effort he was a part of, that is a great example of the power of positive deviants and how to uncover them.

It seemed a line in one of our factories had a serious quality issue. This particular line took sheet metal and using a heavy metal press made the sheets into tubs.

The entire line had low quality except for this one guy. His tubs were always fine. The black belts watched him, my coach included, without noticing him doing anything particularly different. It must be the machine they thought so they moved him to another machine. The quality followed him. They moved him again and yet again the good quality tubs were produced from his machine while the rest had poor quality.

Finally they asked, we’ll call him Ted, what he did differently. “I don’t do anything special,” said Ted. “Just what everybody else does.”

 The black belts asked him to take them through his process, step by step.

 “I take the sheet metal and place it on the machine, I press the machine, then release and remove the tub. Then I take the rag and wipe off the machine…”

You do what?

 “I wipe the machine, you know, inside the tub mold.”

Why do you do that?

“I don’t know, I’ve just always done it.” The black belts looked around and noticed that no one else on the line did that.

Armed with a new insight the black belts dug deeper finding, that tiny metal shavings would accumulate in the tub and eventually scratch or mar the tub causing the defects. Using the rag cleaned out the shavings and never let them build up to a point of causing damage. Ted didn’t know why he did that; perhaps it was a habit instilled in him by a supervisor long ago or maybe even his parents. Even he didn’t remember.

Once everyone on the line started using a rag to wipe off the machine after each press, the defects disappeared.

Ted was a positive deviant, or deviation. Something good was happening in contrast to the other workers.

A positive deviance is an approach in any organization, business or community that provides better solutions to a problem than those provided by others, despite facing similar challenges and having no extra resources or knowledge.

Sometimes it is accidental, as is likely the case with Ted. Other times it is the result of many uncoordinated experiments or efforts. In my own experience I’ve seen a great example in call center teams. With the same customers, resources, instructions and equipment a team or a few teams will perform better than peer teams. The opportunity is in finding these deviations and asking the questions as to why they are succeeding where others are not. They may have discovered something, even by accident, that can be used elsewhere.

There are a million random experiments going on in our organizations and teams every day. We can benefit from those experiments by finding the positive deviants and using the insight they give to help us solve big problems.