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http://www.royblakeley.name/larry_blakeley/larryblakeley_photos_jpeg.htm

(Contact Info: larry at larryblakeley dot com)

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I manage this Web site and the following Web sites: Leslie (Blakeley) Adkins - my oldest daughter

Lori Ann Blakeley (June 20, 1985 - May 4, 2005) - my middle daughter

Evan Blakeley- my youngest child

Many of the ideas in Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within and Change the World: How Ordinary People Can Accomplish Extraordinary Results can be summed up in the following passage from Deep Change (Jossey-Bass Inc., 1996):

"Deep change assumes that one person can change the larger system or organization in which he or she exists. … When we have successfully experienced a deep change, it inspires us to encourage others to undergo a similar experience. We are all potential change agents. As we discipline our talents, we deepen our perceptions about what is possible. … We must continually choose between deep change or slow death.

A number of subjects are addressed in those sentences. Let’s begin by talking about slow death. Because it’s natural for all human beings to experience disappointment, failure, and difficulty, it’s very, very easy over time to get committed to our comfort zone, that place of habit in which we know we can exist without effort. Over time, these habits are equivalent to slow death — if I am not learning, I am dying. When our comfort zone solidifies into habits, we get trapped in slow death, which eventually turns into negative emotions such as depression and anger. We have magnificent defense mechanisms that allow us to deny and project so that we don’t have to admit our slow deaths and deal with them.

The second big point made in the passage you read is that individuals can change the system, which is an observation contradicted by our normal experience. The normal curve of distribution shows us that middle-of-the-curve behavior is most likely to occur. It is shaped by the system. Consequently, the average person learns to move along and not make waves.

I am very taken by the concept of positive deviance. Deviance is generally viewed as a bad thing. But on one end of the curve, we find deviance in the form of excellence, the very behavior we want to promote. Systems don’t like either positive or negative deviance, though, and are designed to crush both. So if we take risks to be excellent, the system will push back.

Richard Pascale in Surfing the Edge of Chaos (Crown Business, 2000) describes positive deviance as it is practiced by Save the Children in poor villages in Vietnam. Rather than simply throwing resources at the problem, which will later be withdrawn, after which the situation will return to normal, Save the Children went into villages in Vietnam where many, but not all, children were starving. They engaged the villagers in studying the situation and identifying the positive deviants who were also poor but had healthy children. Then the villagers showed one another how this was done. Save the Children was amplifying positive deviance. So now when people say something can’t be done, I ask for examples of positive deviance. But people are often uncomfortable with these notions because they suggest that we all have the potential to do things that many claim are impossible.

To tie all of this together, if we are not growing, we are dying. And if we are growing and pushing the edges of the system, we will meet great resistance. And yet it is possible for us to be positive deviants, and positive deviants change the world. There are documented cases of this phenomenon in education just as there are in other fields." - Change: Its a matter of life or slow death,(full interview here), by Robert Quinn, Journal of Staff Development, Fall 2001 (Vol. 22, No. 4), http://www.nsdc.org/library/publications/jsd/quinn224.cfm