Are you interested in boosting positive deviance in your team or organisation? Here’s a great positive psychology case study for anyone who wants to spread the word about the power of positive deviance.
The BackTrack program in Armidale is a non-profit organisation that focuses on helping young people get back on track. The program seeks to take children between the ages of 12 and 19 years and place them on a path to positivity. Some children are faced with complex challenges that can make it harder for them to achieve success than others. However, non-profit members at BackTrack have noticed that seeing the good in these young people, rather than seeing them as no-gooders, has the biggest impact on their future success.
BackTrack has an 87% success rate when it comes to showing young people the right kind of training and education. The program employs a model of positive deviance to show that pointing out good behaviours and rewarding young people for these good behaviours is much better than punishing them for the bad ones. Treating at-risk youth like family members is proven to accelerate their chances of success. This is just another example of positive deviance in action. Individuals, organisations and institutions can benefit from implementing a model of positive deviance in the workplace – or even in personal life.
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About the author of this article:
Eleanor Shakiba is a positive psychology trainer. Her passion is working with positive deviants – the people in communities and organisations who break paradigms and build new solutions to entrenched problems. Eleanor is the author of the Positive Psychology Toolkit for HR and L&D practitioners. She also runs a range of specialist retreats and workshops for trainers and facilitators.