As you know I’ve been attracted to attractors recently. I’ve found an example of attractors in patterning improvements in community settings. Russell Gonnering has a post over on the Cognitive Edge site on amplifying positive “attractors” to benefit community healthcare. He cites work by Marian Zeitlin and Jerry and Monique Sternin.

A Tufts University nutritionist, Dr. Zeitlin used the term “positive deviant” in the book, “Positive Deviance in Child Nutrition”, authored with Hossein Ghassemi and Mohamed Mansour. While studying malnutrition in Africa, the authors were struck by the fact that some children seemed to be doing quite a bit better than others. These were the “positive deviants”. The adaptive child care and feeding behaviors of these children, as well as the social networks that supported them, were studied. Life in the village was a Complex Adaptive System, and these people had adapted very well. The genius of Zeitlin and the Sternins was to realize that the key was to identify what was going right for those children and amplify it, instead of focusing on what was going wrong with the rest of the community and trying to fix it. In other words, they understood the value of amplifying a positive attractor instead of trying to impose order!!

To quote from the Fast Company article:

“The traditional model for social and organizational change doesn’t work,” says Sternin, 62. “It never has. You can’t bring permanent solutions in from outside.” Maybe the problem is with the whole model for how change can actually happen. Maybe the problem is that you can’t import change from the outside in. Instead, you have to find small, successful but “deviant” practices that are already working in the organization and amplify them. Maybe, just maybe, the answer is already alive in the organization — and change comes when you find it.

I wonder if looking for “positive deviance” to amplify would work for community anti-drug coalitions. Of course you would have to confront the federal and state insistence on “importing change for the outside.”