It was the identification of Divergent or Imaginative Thinking, its relationship to Convergent or Logical Thinking, and the goal of Lateral Thinking that led me to Positive Deviance. This all happened while researching for the Intellectual Self-Defense books. Deviance and divergence are closely related concepts. Deviance is often considered a form of social divergence, and it refers specifically to behaviors that break social norms or rules. It usually carries a negative, punitive connotation. Divergence seems to be a broader term for moving away from, or failing to conform to, a standard or average thought, and it feels less negative than deviance, but is still a little rebellious. I was immediately intrigued by the nuance of the words and their applications, and by the power of their disruption as gestures or symbols that communicate meaning. 

It was compelling to me to see how language affects our relationship to words, ideas, and, in turn, action or behavior. Deviance and Divergence really just mean different from “the norm,” and this can have both positive and negative implications. Still, they are always disruptive to the status quo… and that’s where the negative connotations come in. As a rule, power as it is doesn’t regard disruption kindly. Therefore, the term deviance is often used to pass judgment. In this essay, I stand eager to reclaim the word and celebrate its disruptive value. Straying or deviating from an accepted norm is always a brave thing to do! Little did I know that many others had been doing this for years: not just reclaiming the word, but also recognizing, studying, applying, and disseminating Positive Deviance. 

Positive Deviance originates from an institutional public health context. It later moved into education reform and organizational theory. But at its core, it is a really interesting approach to behavioral and social change based on the idea that within a community, some individuals will engage in unusual behavior, which just happens to help them solve problems better than others who face similar challenges. These individuals are Positive Deviants. 

The concept first appeared in the 1970s in nutrition research. In Vietnam, during this time, researchers noticed that despite extreme poverty, some families had well-nourished children while others did not. It was the outliers who managed to solve a problem that seemed insurmountable. These families had been collecting and using food the community deemed inappropriate for children; they also washed their kids’ hands before meals, and fed them three or four times a day instead of the typical two meals usually provided to children. The most interesting part of this original application of positive deviance didn’t just come from identifying the value of breaking from the pack and doing things differently; it also came from enacting the new nutritional program inspired by the positive deviants. Instead of telling the participants what to do differently, the program was designed to help them act their way into a new way of thinking. It is a radical shift in consciousness.

It is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.

–Jerry Sternin

Positive Deviance was presented as a strategy: they identified individuals who succeed within broken systems without additional resources, studied what they did differently, and replicated it. It makes sense, it’s tidy, and it’s measurable. It became a strengths-based strategy, a positive, user-led framework that focuses on an individual’s inherent strengths, resilience, and resources rather than deficits or weaknesses, ideally spreading throughout the community. This strategy is based on the principle that the community already has the solutions and the best insight into solving its problems. That collective intelligence, where knowledge is not concentrated in the leadership of the community or external experts, but distributed throughout the community, and in which sustainability is essential. It operates within a community’s assets and caters to that cultural context. Fundamental, too, is the idea that it is easier to change behavior by practicing something rather than just knowing about something. Positive Deviance begins with an invitation to change, and the agency of the community is crucial to the process. 

But Positive Deviance isn’t just a method. The idea feels larger than its definition. It’s a recurring human response to a challenged existence. Across time and cultures, whenever systems have stalled, when authority has hardened, or learning has become stunted so much that blind obedience replaces understanding, certain figures appear. Not as glowing golden warriors but regular people who behave unexpectedly inside environments that discourage it, let alone reward it. These people aren’t necessarily “burn the system down” revolutionaries, but they do reveal the limits of the system by inhabiting it differently. They offer new alternative futures through their diverging responses. 

That’s why I paint. It’s because I can create the kind of world that I want, and I can make this world as happy as I want it.

–Bob Ross

While the focus of Positive Deviance is on the success of strategies, not the heroics of the individual, we’re still going to discuss a few people throughout history who stand out as Positive Deviants in order to recognize the many shapes it can take. Let’s begin with the first person who came to mind when I started thinking about Positive Deviance beyond its public health applications: Bob Ross. What Bob Ross did was disarmingly radical. First, in a competitive, fast-paced media environment, when Dallas and Dynasty, or Knight Rider and Magnum, P.I., were the thing, he showed, in contrast, a soft, slow, compassionate, humble self.

Ross was a positive deviant in the worlds of television, art, and education. He reframed mistakes as neutral, showed gentleness rather than authority, and normalized patience and presence. He offered accessibility rather than punitive exclusionary instruction. He helped people to quietly restore trust in their own creative instincts and their abilities. He is the ultimate example of the idea that one can “act their way into a new way of thinking” through hands-on activities. (This is one of the practices I really value from our Philomathy book that I hadn’t recognized as such until I began researching this essay.) Bob Ross firmly believed that anyone could paint, arguing that painting is a learned skill developed through practice rather than an innate talent. He frequently countered the “I can’t paint” mindset by emphasizing that with desire, patience, and the right technique, anyone can create art. His philosophy was that “talent” is just a pursued interest. He made art approachable and safe, democratizing creativity. 

Bob Ross’ nonjudgmental pedagogy, on top of all the other disruptive impact he had, is powerful. He shifted authority into companionship and reframed error as opportunity. Generally, traditional education ranks and pits people against each other, in some cases even against themselves, perhaps inadvertently, but it does anyway (through grading, scores, and pressure). It vilifies mistakes and the idea of not knowing, and this breeds fear and shame. In the arts, while a much freer field, many teachers focus on rigid technique, concepts, and critique; the art world itself suffers from significant creative elitism. Ross focused on encouragement, joy, and the idea of the now legendary “happy accidents”. Bob Ross obviously didn’t reject art instruction; he humanized it and lowered the barriers for creative participation.  He did this through a media that idolized the very opposite, and yet he didn’t reject or condemn television; he just used it differently.

All you need is a dream in your heart and a little practice. The secret to doing anything is believing that you can do it.

–Bob Ross

Positive Deviance is transhistorical because it is part of human nature; even if the term was coined in the 70s, we can be sure to find it throughout history. Now we’re going to go back in the past and look at a few other Positive Deviants, starting with Hypatia of Alexandria. She was the leading mathematician and astronomer of the Eastern Roman Empire. She worked to preserve Greek mathematical and astronomical heritage and taught mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy to her loyal students at a time when intellectual openness was collapsing under religious and political absolutism. She continued to teach, to question, to think publicly, even as such acts became dangerous. Very dangerous. A situation so wrought with danger that after being labeled a “pagan,” she was murdered by Christian zealots. Her deviance was not a rebellion for spectacle. However, as a woman scholar in a male-dominated intellectual world, she surely stood out. Her deviance was persistence and public intellectual integrity in the face of difficult opposition. Hypatia affirmed her intellectual endeavors, conservancy, development, and the sharing of education in the face of ignorant prejudice. In late antiquity, religious authority increasingly defined intellectual boundaries, and Hypatia’s continued devotion to classical philosophy represented a living alternative. She disrupted the idea that the truth had to be enforced, and her strategy was to participate without surrender, showing that reason could not be easily controlled. 

Confucius also lived in a period of political instability. His successful strategy was to deviate from the brute logic of power by centering education on moral cultivation, relational ethics, and self-reflection. He proposed that a just society begins not with force, but with the inner lives of its people. He made education portable and as democratic as he could for his time. He did not restrict teaching to the aristocracy or the elites. While many of his students were from privileged backgrounds, he emphasized that it was not their social standing or rank that granted them nobility, but that nobility was something to be earned through their character development. His approach to education was transformative. Having done this, his strategy was to rebuild society from the inside out, through relationships. Confucian thought is not abstract metaphysics, but relational ethics: Father to son, ruler to subject, friend to friend. He proposed that societies collapse not only from corruption at the top but also from the erosion of trust between people. His pedagogy shattered the idea that governance should be based on dominance and proposed that it should be rooted in values, and that rulers who lacked virtue were illegitimate, even if they were intimidating and powerful. His philosophy, unlike Hypatia’s, was eventually absorbed into the system and became state orthodoxy centuries later. Confucius’ deviant ideas reshaped the institutions to such an extent that they didn’t appear to be deviant anymore. In both cases, for Hypatia and Confucius, Positive Deviance took the form of refusal. A refusal to let authoritarianism justify domination, a refusal to let chaos excuse cruelty or intellectual closure.

Our Renaissance deviant is Erasmus. His successful strategy was reform through scholarship, humor, and accessibility. He resisted educational norms that relied on fear, punishment (physical and mental), and rote learning. He advocated learning through dialogue, humor, and play. These ideas were radical precisely because they treated students as thinking beings rather than human receptacles. Even today, his approach would seem radical. Erasmus, as with our other deviants, also lived through challenging times. The church held immense institutional power, education was for the elite and often rigid and unforgiving, and theological disputes were escalating toward violence. He used satire like a scalpel to criticize corruption within the church and the intellectual life, employing irony and wit while weaving in classical references. He was a master of the High Brow Low Brow mix!

But it was his approach toward education that was the real shift; he believed education should cultivate judgment and moral discernment, not just enforce doctrinal correctness, i.e., critical thinking, a word that wouldn’t exist until the 1800s. He returned to original texts (like the Greek Bible) and analyzed them himself (taught his students to do the same) instead of accepting interpretations handed down to him, which was destabilizing because, if people could read foundational texts themselves, well, authority shifts. And not only that, but he believed and promoted the idea that education and discovery should be enjoyed. He disrupted the harshness and cruelty of the educational system he knew with play. So, within the classical training, he encouraged independent interpretation, reduced brutality, and modeled critique through humor instead of dehumanization. He was a deviant who reformed systems because he believed they could evolve if people had better tools for thinking and a good time doing it. 

A few hundred years later, in the late 18th century, during the Enlightenment, Mary Wollstonecraft exemplified what it means to be a Positive Deviant. This period in time loudly proclaimed reason, liberty, equality, and human rights... for men. She argued that education should cultivate reason and autonomy in women, and that women were not there to submit or serve as ornamentation. Obedience was framed as a virtue for women, but she insisted that thinking was a moral responsibility for all. So she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women, in which she argued that if reason is the foundation of human dignity and women are rational beings, then denying them education is both irrational and immoral. It was a critique not just of the condescending education women were receiving, focused on charm and subordination, but also a proposal that it should be one that assisted their intellectual development, their moral independence, and their civic participation. She disrupted the idea of gender hierarchy as natural, and the purpose of education as social control, and highlighted the hypocrisy behind “reason, liberty, equality, and human rights” if it didn’t also include women. She did this not to damage the ideals of the Enlightenment but to strengthen them by demanding integrity. 

As education systems formalized during the industrial era, Positive Deviance became both more necessary and more subtle. One of the clearest examples of Positive Deviance may be the one we overlook most easily: children. This usually changes through conditioning, of course, but at their core, children are Positive Deviants and masters of divergent thinking. Which, of course, means we are all born with this potential. Children ask questions without fear of being inadequate. They test boundaries not to disrupt, but to understand. They learn sideways, relationally, experimentally long before learning is formalized into objectives and outcomes.

Maria Montessori took the time to observe and recognize that children would adapt and learn in different ways. She noticed that when freed from rigid instruction and constant correction, children consistently deviated from adult expectations in ways that led to deeper concentration, self-regulation, and care for their environment. They repeated tasks without external reward, for the pleasure of mastery. They corrected themselves without punishment. She saw that children naturally followed their curiosity instead of external approval, and that they did so not as rebellion or defiance. She recognized that children are entire autonomous beings who deserve agency and respect. She deviated to acknowledge and respect deviance. 

Montessori’s strategy was one of radical observation followed by environmental redesign to support the open-ended growth and the pursuits of natural positive deviants. She recognized that children were not failing to conform to the system, but that the system was failing to recognize the natural intelligences that were already present. Children’s so-called “misbehavior” often reflected a refusal to comply with rules that were less meaningful than authoritarian ones. She realized that education can, of course,  suppress this deviation in the name of order and efficiency. Instead, she realized we can learn to observe it, protect it, and design environments where it can mature rather than disappear. Montessori chose to have an open mind over having control, to place trust in children instead of coercing them toward a predetermined end, and to nurture and pay attention to the individual. She created spaces of freedom within structure, tactile materials, uninterrupted work time, and mutual respect. The teacher became a guide rather than a taskmaster. Her deviance was not simply pedagogical, it was ethical. She realized that freedom without structure collapses and that structure without freedom would suffocate, so she prepared the learning environment to balance both.

Maria Montessori disrupted foundational assumptions about children and power. Her strategy did not attempt to dominate children into learning, to fill and fix them. She reframed childhood as a capacity and not a deficiency. Her deviance lay in stepping back, an act that contradicted nearly every assumption about what success in schooling looked like. She modeled that control did not have to be and should not be the basis of education. She prioritized mindfulness, repetition, slowness, sensory engagement, and independence over speed and “efficiency.” She validated children’s natural leaning instinct. In the end, Montessori didn’t create Positive Deviants; she recognized that children already are, and that it isn’t something rare, simply something that gets suppressed. Her genius move was to make Positive Deviance sustainable. 

Paulo Freire, another radical figure in pedagogy, discussed the political consequences of ignoring humanity in education. He rejected the idea that students, of any age, are empty containers waiting passively to be filled in whatever way is deemed appropriate. He insisted that education was either a practice of domination or a practice of freedom, and that it was never neutral. His deviation was relational: teacher and student as co-creators of knowledge, learning as dialogue rather than deposit. His successful strategy was developing consciousness through dialogue. He began by working with poor and illiterate people who were excluded from political participation because literacy was required to vote. Instead of teaching literacy as a skill, he reframed it as an awakening. Education as awakening.

Freire critiqued traditional education as authoritarian and oppressive. He defined it as the “Banking Model”; as we mentioned before, this means the passive student waits helplessly to be filled by the teacher and the system in the ways they see fit. Instead, he proposed a liberating model of education where students and teachers learn together, knowledge emerges from that dialogue, and, through practice, literacy begins with a person’s lived reality. So that reading and learning become reflection, and then that reflection becomes agency. The goal was to cultivate awareness that would naturally turn into action. 

Another radical move was his trust in the marginalized as thinkers. At that point, and even today, we live with the fiction of “the ignorant masses.” He rejected the assumption that the poor or uneducated lacked intellectual capacity; he viewed people in general, without hierarchy, as philosophers of their own condition, analysts of their own lives, and fully capable of transforming their world. His entire practice disrupted not only pedagogy but also power structures. He emphasized the fact that education cannot be neutral. It either domesticates people into compliance or equips people to question and transform reality. He challenged the idea that only some have authority and ownership of knowledge, and he refused to keep silent or support a silence that led to disenfranchisement. Freire knew oppression persists when people cannot name their condition, and that education helps people articulate what they have internalized so much that it’s almost imperceptible. Notably, his work was seen as threatening enough that he was imprisoned and exiled. Positive Deviance is rarely comfortable for power. Neither Montessori nor Freire aimed for novelty or renown; they sought dignity and agency for all. Who knew that would be so threatening?!

Participation — that’s what’s going to save the human race.

–Pete Seeger

One of the most striking and powerful aspects of Positive Deviance is how often it spreads beyond classrooms into culture itself. Pete Seeger was an iconic American folk singer, songwriter, and social activist who played a pivotal role in popularizing folk music and using it to support causes like civil rights, environmentalism, and peace. He used music not exclusively as a performance and entertainment, but as a form to welcome participation. In an industry increasingly shaped by celebrity and consumption, he insisted that songs belonged to the people who sang them together. His deviance lay in collapsing the distance between artist and audience, turning culture into a shared civic action. In practice, his strategy took the form of strategic simplicity, with repetitive structures, clear melodies, and accessible lyrics. His music did not lack complexity or depth, and this strategy allowed for songs that could connect and travel because they could be learned quickly, sung at marches, and didn’t feel exclusive because they didn’t require virtuosity to participate in. He used tools available, voice, banjo, and gatherings, and reoriented them. Seeger stayed inside what makes American culture and sang it back to itself, but differently.

Pete Seeger disrupted the cultural assumption that celebrity was the goal of art and that art does not deal in politics. He linked art clearly to moral awareness and modeled courage. Most of all, he disrupted passivity. He allowed his audience to see that they weren’t there simply to consume, that they were, in fact, contributing. He truly believed in art’s social and civic function; he knew his music was an invitation to moral reflection and collective action. Seeger made deviation contagious and inviting. His Positive Deviance edges into Reciprocal Rebellion.

In science, Jane Goodall deviated by observing with empathy rather than detachment. She named animals, attended to relationships, and allowed care to coexist with rigor. Funny how often empathy aligns with Positive Deviance. At a time when objectivity was equated with emotional distance, she demonstrated that attention and respect could deepen understanding rather than compromise it. While the scientific community of researchers was composed of trained academics who numbered and absolutely did not name animals, and in which field research followed strict methodological hierarchies, Goodall deviated from most of it. She did not even have a university degree when she began her research. Before she classified and imposed preconceived categories, she spent months watching. She learned about the individuals and the noted relationships. She took her time; she was in no rush. Goodall also gave the animals names, not numbers. This was very controversial because it disrupted the boundary between human and animal that much of science depended upon. Her findings proved to be scientifically rigorous, yet she didn’t compromise empathy, and this didn’t compromise accuracy. She allowed emotion into the frame, she didn’t hide her care for the animals she studied. She disrupted the idea that detachment is integrity in scientific culture, which held that distance equalled rigor. Her work showed that attention and empathy could coexist with precision and deepen discoveries into the ethical implications as well as biological and philosophical ones. Her deviation humanized scientific practice.

Knowledge without responsibility is incomplete.

–Rachel Carson

Similarly, Rachel Carson refused to separate scientific precision from moral responsibility. She wrote clearly, poetically, and publicly challenging industrial power while reframing humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Her work was dismissed as sentimental precisely because it asked people to feel what they were destroying. By the mid-20th century, industrial agriculture and chemical pesticide use were expanding rapidly. DDT was widely celebrated as a miracle solution. Questioning it was treated as anti-progress. In Silent Spring she began with a powerfully evocative image. Her strategy was to make the invisible visible, and she understood that people must first imagine loss before they can act to prevent it. She meticulously documented the ecological impacts and consequences of pesticide use, then argued in a way that wasn’t constrained to charts and accusations. She didn’t argue with emotional alarmism but set out an evidence-based critique. She argued that science carries a responsibility and refused to separate knowledge from consequences. Her deviance expanded environmental awareness, strengthened public discourse, catalyzed the environmental movements, and demonstrated that moral clarity can coexist with scientific accuracy. 

In the late twentieth century, Positive Deviance, which had previously appeared unnamed across all areas of life, entered a new one: mass media. Carl Sagan insisted that science belonged to everyone. He spoke on the air to millions of people about atoms and galaxies with humility and wonder, rejecting the idea that knowledge belonged to a few and that it required being a cold academic. He spoke to everyone and invited everyone. In doing so, he violated an unspoken rule of classic gatekeeping: that authority must distance itself from the public and from wonder. Through Cosmos and other public lectures, he treated viewers as capable of grasping complexity, deviating from elitism. When he spoke of stardust, cosmic perspective and humility before the universe he integrated emotion with evidence. Like Wollstonecraft, Freire, and Seeger, he also connected knowledge and education with political and cultural context. Sagan was very vocal on nuclear power, pseudoscience, and the erosion of scientific literacy, as well as the state of traditional education. He warned openly that democracy cannot function if citizens cannot distinguish between evidence and manipulation. He made critical thinking a civic duty. 

Like another one of our media icons, Bob Ross, Carl Sagan approached misunderstanding and not knowing with patience rather than mockery. He modeled intellectual humility, admitting uncertainty while captivatingly defending the importance of evidence-based thought. Of the many ways Carl Sagan was a Positive Deviant, his disruption of the false divide between science and the humanities is my favorite. He openly loved and quoted literature, invoked philosophy, and treated narrative as essential to comprehension of the universe. He widened learning as a whole and science as a field, restored wonder to rational inquiry, strengthened public scientific literacy, noted the value of heatlhy skepticism, and modeled humility within expertise. He made knowledge feel approachable, achievable, and shared.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

–Carl Sagan

And then there is Fred Rogers.

Like Carl Sagan and Bob Ross, he worked on TV, one of the most commercialized mediums imaginable. He refused to engage in pageantry, urgency, or manipulation. He treated children as the emotionally complex people they are. He centered inner life at a time when education increasingly emphasized behavior, grading, and national ranking over understanding. His deviant strategy was a radical emotional seriousness (embracing the entire spectrum of emotions from joy to grief and anger) in a medium built for speed and superficial stimulation. He refused almost every norm it rewarded; he spoke slowly and gently, and he allowed for silence. He deliberately changed his shoes and cardigan on camera, and none of it was accidental. It was a resistance to overstimulation. 

Like Maria Montessori before him, he recognized that children were full moral agents. He addressed children directly about fear, anger, jealousy, death, divorce, war, racial tensions, sadness, delight, curiosity, and much more. He did not dilute reality because he knew children were already capable complex interior beings. Fred Rogers modeled emotional regulation; he didn’t just talk about feelings but acknowledged them, like anger without aggression, sadness without shame, and practiced calm without repression. He valued emotional literacy as a strength, not a weakness. This served as a quiet cultural correction. 

Fred Rogers disrupted many dominant narratives simultaneously, the first is that authority and guiding figures require distance and strict hierarchy. He spoke to children as equals, not as a superior instructing inferiors. He did not rely on intimidation to teach. Second is that he wildly disrupted the idea of what masculinity is. So many people did, and still do, associate masculinity with stoicism, aggression, or dominance, and Rogers embodied a masculinity of gentleness, a model of emotional transparency without surrendering any strength. And finally, he disrupted the incentive structure of TV stardom in which he would have profited from urgency, spectacle, and consumption. Instead, he introduced patience, intimacy, and reflection to redirect what the medium could and should do for its audience. He didn’t attack television, but inhabited it differenly. 

None of the figures we’ve looked at rejected their fields. None of them conquered a system. What they did was deviate within them and reorient them.  They expanded what was considered legitimate: knowledge, authority, emotion, empathy, participation, and creativity. 

For Positive Deviants, the humanities, art, music, literature, philosophy, and history have always been their natural shelter. These disciplines preserve ambiguity, context, and moral imagination. They resist final answers and invite us to linger and envision something different and new. When education sidelines the humanities, it doesn’t just remove content; it erodes the conditions under which Positive Deviance can be recognized and sustained. And yet, even then, it persists. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Positive Deviance didn’t have to persist but was encouraged to flourish and thrive always? 

Positive Deviance is not rare.  It is quieted, almost invisibly, by power and tradition. And this is perhaps why, when we finally notice it, it doesn’t feel like a brand-new revelation, but more like remembering something we’d long forgotten.

References + Recommended Reading

• Pascale, R., Sternin, J., & Sternin, M. (2010). The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems. Harvard Business Press.

• Sternin, J., & Choo, R. (2000). “The Power of Positive Deviance.” Harvard Business Review.

• Paulo Freire — Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970).

• Maria Montessori — The Montessori Method (1912).

• Rachel Carson — Silent Spring (1962).

• Mary Wollstonecraft — A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

• Ken Robinson — Creative Schools

• bell hooks — Teaching to Transgress

• John Taylor Gatto — Dumbing Us Down

• Noam Chomsky — On Anarchism (or Understanding Power)

• Neil Postman — Teaching as a Subversive Activity

• Jane Goodall — In the Shadow of Man