Power of Positive Deviance

This book decsribes the potential of some practices and behaviors to change the world for bettter. The idea comes from the fact that in all social and economical phenomena there is a normal distribution where a small portion of actors achieve great results compared with the rest of population. Not in all the cases this may work. For example even if you do exactly what a champion athlete does, the odds are that you wont run 100 meters under 10 seconds. Therefore the potential of positive deviance varies in situations. It may work in nutrition of Vietnamese children and Hospital infections case but it may not work in hundreds of other social problems. The book focuses on what to do once the positive deviant case is chosen, but gives less importance to how to chose the case. W should have a method to calculate the potential of a possible positive deviance in a practice or phenomenon. Although the book says act your way into thinking, I would like to suggest a simple filtering before doing this. The resource requirements and applicability of the results of high performance cases can be calculated by making an estimation of resources needed and expected results and risks related to these. If the resource requirements and risks related to the positive deviance shows a feasibility of acting then you may start your practice to change the world. Good luck to all positive deviants!