Accentuate the Positive

Lynne Viscio has the right idea with her piece Positive Deviance: Stop Focusing on What Went Wrong and Start Focusing on What's Going Well.

She explains that the tendency to focus on mistakes can sabotage change efforts in organizations:

"We see an 85 percent approval rating, and immediately begin unraveling the mystery of the 15% who are dissatisfied to win their approval in the future. While it is valid and valuable to shoot for an approval rating higher than 85%, the positive deviance concept challenges the conventional wisdom about the best way to get there. Positive deviance posits that understanding and reinforcing the hits may be more useful than deconstructing the misses."

Read the rest of her post here, or visit the CommLog blog about "the strategy and practice of communciations inside organizations."