Institute for Analytic Journalism

"Positive Deviance"
Has a nice ring to it, don't you think? In fact, the concept has been batted around for 14-plus years and has evolved enough to have its own physical and virtual place in the universe at the Plexus Institute and Tufts University Positive Deviance Initiative.

"Positive Deviance ... demonstrates that isolated examples of success can be tapped to benefit an entire community or organization. Accomplishing this requires a radical departure from 'benchmarking' and 'best practices' strategies of change....The PD approach builds on successful but 'deviant' (different) practices that are identified from within a community or organization. It is based on the observation that in every group there are certain individuals whose uncommon, but demonstrably successful practices or behaviors enable them to find better solutions than their neighbors or colleagues who have access to exactly the same resources. Its use was pioneered in developing countries and has led to sustainable improvements in seemingly intractable organizational and social issues."

The approach was originally developed for -- and continues to be applied to -- health care. But we at the IAJ like it because it is a "transferable concept and social technology," something that could take root in "deviant" journalism.

We also like the approach because it is an example of how the high-level concepts of complexity studies and Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) can move from the theoretical to the experimental and on to application state. Again, something that journalism, and expecially journalism educators, should be thinking about.

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New link to Chance

by JTJ on Fri 13 May 2005 09:31 PM MDT

We have long admired and appreciated the work of Dartmouth Professor J. Laurie Snell and his colleagues at the CHANCE project. (There are some terrific online lectures on all phases of statistics and probability at the Chance Lectures)

We received the following recently:
In order to give Chance News the chance for a longer life we have changed it to a ChanceWiki. The new url is
http://chance.dartmouth.edu/chancewiki/

For the ChanceWiki we are using the software developed for the very successful free Encyclopedia Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

The wiki software makes it easy for anyone to add an item or to make changes in an existing article (hopefully an improvement) in the current Chance News.

On the Main Page of the ChanceWiki you will find links to the current Chance news and "How to submit a new article or edit an existing article".

We hope you will try making a contribution. If you have any questions I will be happy to try to answer them.

J. Laurie Snell

jlsnell@dartmouth.edu

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