Positive Deviants
An Uncommon Fellowship for Uncertain Times.
February 2024 - November 2024 | A Land-Based Learning Journey
Where do we begin?
Established institutions, stories and systems of all kinds are unravelling before our eyes. Our efforts to fix them only seem to make things worse.
For some, the instability offers possibility. You may be wildly energized by the creative opportunities for change, or feeling trapped in the supercharged mega-bus of post capitalist, post-Covid, post-truth modernity with an intoxicated driver at the wheel as we hurtle towards the edge of the cliff. Maybe some days both are true.
But you’re still hanging in there and working for a flourishing future and for that we’re deeply grateful. You’re still motivated to participate in the story and that fills us with hope.
We can all agree that the defining feature of our most pressing adaptive challenges is their complexity – and complex challenges are impervious to simplistic solutions. But in the face of the uncertainty, it’s easy to retreat back to order – back into habitual perspectives and solutions that offer a sense of safety, control and predictability.
It’s a perfectly understandable response…and it’s adding to deepening mistrust and polarization between traditional, modernist and progressive perspectives – none of which seem to be able to offer a coherent path forward.
The Invitation
Positive Deviants is an intimate 9-month learning journey with a small cohort of practical visionaries.
Without learning, there can be no change, adaptation or evolution. At its heart, Positive Deviants is both a crucible and collective inquiry intent on exploring evolutionary change within ourselves and across the systems that we inhabit. It is designed to provide the learning conditions required to address complex challenges and meet adaptive challenges, where the changes sought require people to not only employ their skills and life experience, but potentially alter their mindset, behavior or perspective.
While we believe it to be critical to find good company, Positive Deviants is not intended to be a prestigious networking event or an identity-affirming affinity group. Rather it is intended to be a place where we might challenge and encourage each other to take the next, necessary step on the path, to explore big questions, and to allow ourselves the many gifts that come from befriending uncertainty.
There are many ways to intervene skillfully in social ecosystems – to influence the course of events as they unfold. The shape of tomorrow depends on the way we engage today. The questions that drive us hold the power to change a story that has us stuck in all kinds of limiting patterns of thought and action.
Positive Deviants is a fellowship for people who are courageously committed to changing that story.
A Positive Deviant is an Outlier…
A person or group that succeeds despite the odds. Positive Deviance reminds us to:
Look for people and processes whose outcome deviates in a positive way from the norm.
Seek patterns of emergence and possibility already alive within any system.
Focus on what’s working rather than what’s missing or broken.
Recognize that change comes from within.
Remain perpetually curious, respectful and humble.
Embrace difference and diversity as a vital community resource.
Entertain big questions and move with curiosity rather than certainty.
Learning Landscape
New Leadership for Systems Transition.
Positive Deviants is intended to cultivate the skillful leadership required for guiding systems transition and fostering enduring change.
The program does not have ‘learning outcomes’ like a university course. Participants are coming from very different starting points and our primary goal is to support community leaders, social entrepreneurs, systems artists, and educators through an extended, whole-person learning journey.
As we understand it, systems entrepreneurship has both “inner” and “outer” dimensions. A system leader’s awareness of their innermost selves is a critical variable in their capacity to effectively foster change within complex systems. The ‘outer’ work of trying to change a system will often amplify our own ‘inner’ tensions and assumptions, blind spots and paradoxes; our capacity to engage generatively with such personal material profoundly shapes the nature of our subsequent impact in the world. This focus on the inter-dependence of both the inner and outer dimensions of systems intervention is a defining feature of Positive Deviants.
Timeless tradition and contemporary research alike stress that both our external competencies and inner capabilities can be actively cultivated and developed. It is helpful then to be clear on what we will be exploring and how.
Domains of Practice
Ways of Seeing.
Expanding our perspective and seeing the ‘invisible’. Sometimes this may mean actively examining, or even being gently challenged in perspectives that feel ‘true’ – including the ones we hold most closely. In practice, it’s harder than it sounds. Positive Deviants endeavors to create a learning environment where such exploration can be held in a good way. Regular intervals of silent pause, journaling, contemplation, story-telling, and ‘devils advocacy’ will be a few of the ways we do this together.
Ways of Relating.
Cultivating intimacy, collaborativity, and connection with the human and more than human worlds. We will adopt an attitude of appreciation for each other, the living Earth, and future generations. Practicing an appreciative attitude is different than agreeing, or attempting to please, but rather requires effort when conflict inevitably arises, or when working across boundaries of difference. Humility, an ethos of care, and fluidity in one’s position are also practiced here.
Ways of Knowing.
Cultivating greater fluency with the principles and practices of a complexity lens. To do so, we will hold a keen awareness that certain issues are likely more complex than they seem, and may require critical thinking, future vision, hope, and an ability to hold multiple stories at once. We will endeavour to bring some rigour and depth to understanding complexity from many different perspectives. We will adopt noted complexity scholar and coach Jennifer Garvey-Berger’s position, “what do I know to be true, and how could I be wrong?”
Ways of Doing.
Honing our capacity for courageous and skillful action. We will explore the patterns of intervention required to successfully navigate hyper-complexity and disruptive change – which are often non-linear, non-forceful and may appear to flout conventional norms of leadership and advocacy. We will endeavor to practice moving with authenticity, audacity, creativity, and agency in ways that disrupt conventional patterns, shine a light on unhelpful consensus agreement, and open up constricting narratives in the direction of innovation and possibility.
Ways of Being.
Cultivating greater self-awareness & centered presence. We will endeavor to engage each other, our work, our learning, and our sense of self with a growth mindset. Standing firmly in our being also invites deepening our relationship to the unique purpose that drives us. Through coaching, dialogue, and practice, we will also explore our habitual reactive patterns, and the creative competencies we hold that allow us to move with generative impact in complexity.
What is ‘Systems Change’?
Systems change means many different things to different folks. In political discourse, the system is often a linguistic shortcut meaning the current reality and all its negative aspects. All sides of the political spectrum mobilize support using narratives that characterize particular groups as victims of a ‘system’ run by – and for the benefit of - some form of ‘corrupt elite’. ‘Systems change’ requires dismantling existing structures to arrive at a future that is fundamentally different (more equitable, more sustainable etc.).
In Positive Deviants we will be inviting a complexity lens to the table. Any living system – at whatever scale – has distinctive characteristics and properties that emerge from the relational dynamics within that system along with the external relational and energy pathways that sustain & shape it. We are using systems change to describe intentional efforts to influence those dynamics and pathways in ways that lead to the emergence of ‘beneficial’ new systems properties, outcomes or systems states.
Who This is For
These times call for a rich diversity of approaches to systems transformation.
We each have our part to play. Some are called to the work of dismantling existing systems. Some to incrementally improve crumbling systems from within. Others to support those suffering most from the design or collapse of existing systems. All are needed.
But Positive Deviants is intended to serve quite specific changemakers - positive deviants who are primarily focused on building viable alternatives to the status quo. These are people who are committed to both evolutionary change and to finding the most skillful and effective way to bring about such change – even if it requires significant personal transformation.
We are looking for systems entrepreneurs with transformative ideas that hold the potential to re-organize the energy of an unstable system at scale. People who are building a different kind of future and actively bringing others along on the journey. We don’t care whether you identify as a ‘changemaker’, a ‘complexity leader’, a ‘social innovator’ or any other label. You may be working in community settings, a non-profit organization, a start-up or established business, the philanthropic sector or various levels of government or public service.
But wherever you work and however you identify, we are looking for five distinct characteristics:
Transformative Potential.
Your work holds the potential for significant impact around a collective challenge. You can see a different way of doing things that may be invisible to others and you are intent on bringing it into reality. We’re particularly interested in ideas and approaches that are genuinely fresh and innovative. It might be something utterly new that has never been seen before. It might be an act of bricolage – the creative recombination of familiar forms. Or it might involve the rediscovery of original teachings to address contemporary challenges. Even if it’s only a seed right now, your work holds the very real possibility of transformative impact at the scale of whole socio-cultural and eco-systems.
Visionary Action.
At your core, you are a practitioner – a creative and audacious ‘doer’. A weary and somewhat shattered optimist in whom the spark of hope has not yet been extinguished. Your past is likely littered with projects, organizations, programs, platforms, movements, campaigns, processes or artworks that you have founded, built, initiated, tried. These initiatives may be very visible to others, but they could also be executed quietly in the margins. There will undoubtedly be juicy failures in there too.
Tenacious but Flexible Commitment.
It doesn’t have to be a single issue. But your commitment to the creative systems transformation that seems to be your calling is bone-deep, long-term and very real. We’re looking for people who are disciplined and dedicated in pursuit of that commitment. Relentless. Driven. Maybe even a bit obsessive. At the same time, you are so committed to your goal and accountable to the change you seek that you are willing to be flexible in your tactics – even if that means radically shifting your approach, adapting, experimenting or even collaborating with the ‘enemy’.
Openness.
It’s possible you have recently hit the wall or experienced some form of shattering realization that what you are doing is not working and something fundamental in your way of working needs to shift. You are on a threshold of some kind and you sense the lure of a ‘bigger’ story calling you to inhabit your path in a different, more expansive way. You would actively welcome support, outside perspective, coaching and experimentation with new practices at this point in your journey. While you may spend most of your life being a guide for others, right now you know you need – and are truly open to - being guided yourself.
At a more general level, you have an insatiable hunger to learn, to question, to expand your perspective and to lean into the edges of your own development - the humble curiosity and sense of wonder that characterize lifelong learners whatever their station in life. You have a sense of how your own reactivity, unresolved wounds, personal biases and overall state of consciousness impact your capacity for influence. You also know there are many ways of knowing and you are wide open to exploring them. The body’s wisdom. The visionary imagination. The open heart. The deep mind. The vitality of spirit and soul. The teachings of wild landscapes. You have a longing to engage the full spectrum of your intelligence.
Influence.
Such influence may or may not be accompanied by positional authority. But whatever your current role, others look to you as a leader. You have existing relationships and viable entry points into the parts of the system you want to shift. Working in – or on – that system is already part of your daily reality. Your leadership may be directly entrepreneurial. You may be leading an organization, a movement or a community. Or you may be creating richly complex adaptive spaces, networks and resource flows that allow innovation, inquiry, collaboration, collective solutions and emergence from others to thrive and take root. Either way, you already have skills, tools, relationships, clout and experience through which influence can flow.
At the same time, it’s important to state that this is not for everyone.
Indicators that the fellowship may not be a good fit – or the right timing – for potential applicants include:
Certainty.
(too late!)
As the old Zen stories remind us, there’s no point in going on a learning journey if you already know the answers or are too attached to your solutions. What that means in practice is that if your analysis, vision and strategy are already well crystallized and you are mostly implementing (rather than, say, experimenting), you will find a better fit in an accelerator or some other program designed to showcase, fund or otherwise attract resources and support for an initiative in its later stages.
No Clear Focus for Application.
(too soon!)
The fellowship is designed to be a good fit for those who are already actively working/experimenting/supporting creative and entrepreneurial action within the systems they seek to influence. You will already have some position of influence – whether or not that is a formal role. The rhythm of the program is intended to be something like Retreat! Return! Experiment! Learn! Repeat! Without a focused sandbox or project to experiment with, it is likely to feel overly focused on the abstract/personal development/group process.
A Primarily Oppositional Focus.
(too much compromise!)
In the midst of so much egregious destruction and blatant oppression, it is vital to directly oppose, expose, disrupt, resist or at least slow things down long enough to make space for alternatives to even exist. But it’s hard to be a warrior and a builder at the same time. Positive Deviants is intended to support creators and builders working in the spaces that are often made possible by the commitment and inter-generational sacrifices of frontline warriors. But it will not be a good fit if your focus is primarily on on an oppositional strategy or is fully committed to organizing against. The fellowship is likely to ask too much flexibility and compromise of you at this point in your journey.
Discomfort with Whole-Person Learning.
(too weird!)
The fellowship is deliberately and unapologetically multi-modal. It is non-coercive and will not ask participants to compromise their boundaries or values, but it will invite participants to immerse themselves in different kinds of learning experiences. Those who are overly attached or somewhat allergic to particular modalities – whether that be arts and land-based learning, Indigenous teachings, somatic practices, cognitive/theoretical perspectives, the world of spirt/soul/intuition, practical tools and analysis – will be better served by programs with a more singular focus.
Mismatch with Personal Process.
(too risky!)
As we begin to metabolize the fallout of a global pandemic and destigmatize the lingering impacts of marginalization, and systemic oppressions, inter-generational pain and suffering, exposure to traumatic events or a lifetime spent on the frontlines of change, we are perhaps more keenly aware of our own vulnerabilities than ever before. We recognize that learning is seldom possible in spaces where there is activation, re-triggering or an absence of safety.
We fully recognize that what many – perhaps most - changemakers need most right now is support, affirmation, respite and, above all, healing. But it’s not what we are primarily offering. It’s important to be clear that while Positive Deviants has a trauma-informed approach, it is intended to be as much crucible as sanctuary. To challenge and stretch as well as to support. It’s not an easy polarity to hold and we will almost certainly get the balance wrong at points. We recognize that learning is seldom possible in spaces where there is activation, re-triggering or an absence of safety. Our invitation to you is to assess your readiness for the stretch, and what resources you have internally and in your community to support you in this kind of learning.