Most change programs in most organizations are built on a specific assumption about how change works. The assumption goes roughly like this: leadership identifies a problem, designs a solution, communicates urgency about why the solution matters, and rolls the solution out across the organization. The employees who comply are good employees. The employees who push back are resistant, and either need to be persuaded or worked around.
Paul Wainwright's session is about why this entire model is upside down — and why the people who push back, in many of the organizations he has worked with, are usually the ones with the most accurate read on what's actually broken.
Wainwright is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and managing director of Initi8 Business Excellence, a UK-based consultancy working across multiple sectors and organization sizes. His framing of change leadership is informed by working at the level where change actually has to happen — with the people on the floor who are being asked to operate differently, and with the managers in the middle who are responsible for translating leadership intent into daily practice. That vantage point produces a different theory of why so many change efforts stall, and a different recommendation about where to look for the people who can make them work.
The recommendation is uncomfortable. The people who can make change work are often the people the organization has labeled as troublemakers. The employees who question protocols. The frontline workers who bend rules in defense of better outcomes. The managers who push back on initiatives that don't quite fit the situation. These are what Wainwright, drawing on a body of literature including Francesca Gino's "Rebel Talent" and Pascale and Sternin's work on positive deviance, calls positive deviants — people who deviate from organizational norms in ways that produce positive outcomes. The argument running through the session is that organizations that learn to recognize and nurture positive deviance produce better change than organizations that try to enforce conformity, and the leadership behaviors that distinguish the two are specific enough to be practiced.
Paul Wainwright is the managing director of Initi8 Business Excellence, a consultancy specializing in enabling organizations to achieve positive and progressive change. The eight core elements of the Initi8 framework focus on Strategy, Design, Leadership, Process, Change, Customer, Learning, and Empowerment. Wainwright has experience leading business improvement projects, introducing continuous improvement frameworks, and working with senior leaders to develop their leadership and management skills across a range of sectors. He is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt who actively works with leaders on gemba walks and ground-level improvement challenges. He delivers material on the MBA course at a local university and offers free consultancy to local charities to help them formulate and deploy operational strategies. He holds a BSc (Hons), MSc, MBA, and is a Chartered Manager (CMgr MCMI).
Wainwright opened by describing the standard pattern of organizational change, in language that should be familiar to anyone who has watched it happen.
A change initiative is triggered from the top of the organization. Margins are eroding. Performance is slipping. Competitors are gaining ground. Whatever the trigger, leadership convenes in a senior meeting and arrives at a decision — usually in the form of "we need to improve" or "we need to become more efficient" or, Wainwright's personal favorite, "we're going to become Lean."
The message lands. The responding silence in the room speaks volumes, as does the sound of every eye in the room rolling. The change is framed as urgent. A burning platform is constructed if one doesn't already exist. Following the Kotter playbook, urgency is established through negatives — the iceberg is melting, the platform is on fire, the company is at risk of falling behind. The message moves down through the organization, gathering middle managers who are now tasked with executing something they don't fully understand and may not believe in.
By the time the urgency reaches the people who do the value-adding work, several things have happened. The urgency has diluted across layers of translation. The terminology that worked in the boardroom — EBITDA, working capital, book-to-bill — means nothing to the people on the floor. The employees who have been raising the underlying problem for years now see a solution being proposed by someone they have never met, addressing a problem they understood long before leadership noticed it. The skepticism is appropriate. The change becomes another initiative to wait out.
Wainwright's stock of quotes from this stage of organizational change is unfortunately representative. "My manager doesn't believe in it, so why should I?" "I've been telling them this for years, Paul, but they don't listen." "It's a flash in the pan. I'll just wait it out." Every one of these reactions traces back to leadership behaviors that have built up over years of similar initiatives. The skepticism isn't irrational. It is the rational accumulated learning of people who have watched the cycle play out before.
The organizational response to this skepticism is often worse than the original problem. Managers build walls around their teams to protect them from outside interference. The walls also protect the managers' own ideologies and the comfortable routines they have built over years. Anyone questioning the established way of doing things becomes a threat to be managed, not an input to be considered. The walls become structural, and the organization develops an immune system against exactly the kind of insight that would help it improve.
Wainwright drew on Edgar Schein's framework to explain what's happening underneath the surface behavior of resistance.
Change triggers two distinct kinds of anxiety, and conflating them produces predictably bad change leadership.
Survival anxiety is the fear that something fundamental is at stake. The business might fail. My job might disappear. I might get fired. The threat is to continued existence in the role.
Learning anxiety is the fear that I personally won't be able to handle what's being asked of me. I can't learn this. I'm not capable. I'll lose status or authority. The threat is to my sense of competence and standing.
The two anxieties produce different reactions and require different responses. The common organizational pattern — which Wainwright described as nearly universal — is to amplify survival anxiety in an attempt to drive change. "If we don't hit this target, the future doesn't look good for any of us." The intent is to create enough urgency that people overcome their inertia and engage with the change.
The result is usually the opposite. When survival anxiety gets amplified artificially, people aren't motivated to engage. They are motivated to protect themselves. The fight-or-flight response that high survival anxiety triggers shuts down exactly the cognitive functions — creativity, openness, learning — that the change requires. Mark Graban added the connection during the Q&A: when you put people into a fight-or-flight state, the parts of their brain capable of generating new ideas and considering alternatives are the parts that get suppressed first. The neurochemistry of survival is not the neurochemistry of innovation.
Schein's recommendation — and Wainwright's — is to do the opposite. Don't amplify survival anxiety. Lower learning anxiety instead. Keep survival anxiety at a slightly higher level than learning anxiety, so the change still feels worth doing, but reduce the personal fear that the change will expose people's inadequacies or threaten their standing.
The practical moves are specific. Provide a positive vision of what success looks like rather than only a negative vision of what failure looks like. Reinforce the message with viable training rather than expecting people to figure it out on their own. Have leaders involved at every stage rather than dropping the change off and disappearing. Acknowledge that learning happens informally and away from the classroom. Create conditions where people can speak openly. Lead by example. Align the structures and systems of the organization to support the change rather than punish those who try.
This sounds obvious when written down. Wainwright's point is that it's almost never how change is actually executed, because the survival-anxiety amplification move is the default and most leaders haven't been trained to do anything different.
The pivot in the session is from explaining why traditional change fails to explaining what would actually work. Wainwright's answer is positive deviance.
The working definition: positive deviance refers to behavior that deviates from the norms of the reference group and has a positive effect on the organization. Two conditions both have to be present. The behavior has to break the established norms, and the outcome has to be positive. If the deviance produces harm or damage, it isn't positive deviance — it's just deviance.
The framing has roots in sociology, where deviance has been studied for a long time in ways that map onto organizational contexts more directly than most leaders realize. Functionalism suggests that deviance is a necessary element of any social system and that deviant behavior often points to failings in the system itself. Structuralism suggests deviance is a result of conformity to a group — the deviant is the one who doesn't go along. Interactionism treats deviance as a negotiated perspective, defined by who has the power to label what counts as acceptable. Marxism frames norms and values as built by those in power to maintain the rules that serve them. Each of these has organizational analogs. The corporate culture defines what's acceptable. The deviant is the one who rejects the definition. Whether the rejection is a problem or a gift depends on whether the existing definition is actually serving the organization's interests.
Wainwright offered a personal example that made the concept concrete. On his drive to work each morning, he travels a stretch of road with a 30 mph speed limit. He sets his cruise control to 30 and drives through. Other drivers regularly overtake him, breaking the speed limit. By the legal definition of the rule, the other drivers are deviant. By the social norm — the actual behavior of the mainstream — Wainwright himself is the deviant. He's the one not conforming to what people actually do. The cyclist on the same road, or the person on a Segway, is even more deviant by the same logic.
The example matters because it shows that deviance isn't a fixed property of a behavior. It's a relationship between a behavior and the norms of a specific group at a specific time. Toyota's production system was deviant relative to the manufacturing norms of its era. Decades later, the same system is the global standard, and people running traditional batch-and-queue manufacturing are the deviants. The relationship has reversed without the underlying behavior changing.
Inside organizations, the positive deviant is the person willing to challenge any layer of the existing culture — the visible artifacts, the espoused values, the underlying assumptions Schein identified as the deepest layer of culture. They don't accept that things have to be the way they are. They don't shrink in the face of the question "but we've always done it this way." They look for opportunities to do things differently, knowing that some of those opportunities will produce better outcomes and some will not.
Wainwright pulled from two researchers' work to describe what positive deviants actually look like.
From Francesca Gino's "Rebel Talent" came several traits worth pulling out individually. Positive deviants embrace the rebel inside — they don't apologize for wanting to do things differently. Gino's example is a renowned Italian chef who takes classical dishes and puts unique spins on them, encountering significant resistance early in his career but holding his conviction and eventually becoming world-renowned with multiple Michelin stars.
Positive deviants seek opportunities to leave their comfort zones, because they know that being uncomfortable is a precondition for genuine growth. They ask questions constantly, like inquisitive children, expanding their understanding rather than protecting what they already know. They acknowledge that they can't know everything, so they actively seek perspectives different from their own — recognizing that diversity is a contributor to success and that the most important thing about another person isn't their demographic profile but what they can bring to the team. They focus on developing their strengths rather than obsessing over their weaknesses. They create engagement through storytelling and help people understand how their contribution connects to the larger picture.
From Pascale and Sternin came complementary traits. Positive deviants look for invisible innovators — the people and opportunities others can't see. They seek out outliers and exceptions. They learn through doing, which means they make mistakes, and they continue going anyway. They allow people to opt out if they don't want to engage. And they let people discover their own solutions to their own problems, then let those people own the solutions.
The composite picture is of someone who is curious, comfortable with discomfort, allergic to status-driven conformity, generous in attributing capability to others, and willing to make mistakes in public in service of getting somewhere better. It's not a flattering self-portrait for most leaders to compare themselves against, which is part of the point. Positive deviance is hard to nurture in others if you can't practice it yourself.
The leadership question that follows is what kind of leader produces conditions where positive deviance can emerge. Wainwright walked through the standard distinction between transactional and transformational leadership, then complicated it.
Transactional leadership operates through extrinsic rewards. Do this and you get a bonus. Hit the target and you get the promotion. Fail and there are consequences. This style produces compliance and engagement to a degree, but the engagement is shallow — it depends on the reward continuing to exist and continuing to be valued by the person receiving it. The pay raise today is great. Tomorrow it's forgotten, and a larger pay raise somewhere else looks more attractive. Transactional leadership at scale produces a culture of self-preservation where people optimize for whatever the reward system measures and disengage from anything else.
Transformational leadership operates through intrinsic motivation. People want to do this because they believe it matters, because it aligns with what they care about, because they see themselves as part of something larger. This style produces deeper engagement, but it comes with its own failure mode. If the leader's vision is wrong, transformational leadership produces deeply engaged employees working toward a misguided goal. The charisma that drives engagement can be deployed in service of a strategy that doesn't actually serve the organization. The danger of transformational leadership is that everyone is committed to a direction that should have been questioned but wasn't.
Wainwright's argument is that neither style alone is sufficient. The combination that produces sustainable positive deviance is transformational leadership paired with genuine empowerment — meaning not just engagement but the structural authority for people to make decisions, challenge assumptions, and act on what they see.
Empowerment is more than a feeling. The research Wainwright drew on describes psychological empowerment as having four components. People have to perceive their work as meaningful. They have to believe in their own competence to do the task. They have to have a sense of self-determination over how the work gets done. And they have to feel they have control over outcomes — that what they do matters and produces consequences.
When these four components are in place, people don't just engage with the work. They take ownership of it. They deviate from the rules when deviation will produce better outcomes, because they understand what the rules are trying to accomplish and can see when the rules are getting in the way. This is the structural foundation of positive deviance. Without it, deviance is either suppressed or punished.
Wainwright pulled additional material from Gino's framework on what leaders need to do to support positive deviance.
Rebel leaders don't need to be at the top of the organization. They can be anyone who prefers to work in an environment where boundaries are challenged and accomplishment isn't constrained by self-imposed limitations.
The characteristics are specific. Rebel leaders seek out the new — actively looking for fresh perspectives and new learning opportunities rather than defaulting to what worked before. They want to be challenged. Gino's example was Alfred Sloan, chairman of General Motors from 1937 to 1956, who would dismiss his board when they were in full agreement on an issue and ask them to come back when they had a better understanding of the problem. The full agreement, Sloan recognized, meant the problem hadn't been adequately examined.
Rebel leaders make it safe for others to challenge them. The fear of reprisal is non-existent. They are open to feedback, open about their own gaps, and willing to be vulnerable about what they don't know. They acknowledge that others may have skills they themselves don't have, and they treat this as useful information rather than as a threat to their standing.
They lead from the front by getting their hands dirty. They understand the issues their people face by being present where the work happens. The respect they earn from their teams comes from the willingness to do this consistently, not from their position in the hierarchy.
The rebel organization Wainwright described — drawing on Gino's somewhat unexpected reference to pirate ships — is one where each crew member knows their role, purpose, and expectations; where speaking up is encouraged; where equality is a central theme rather than a polite aspiration; and where there is fundamental understanding of goal, purpose, and individual contribution. Pirates ran more democratic organizations than most modern corporations, which says something uncomfortable about how far modern organizational design has drifted from what actually works for human collaboration.
A useful framing that ran through the session was Schein's model of organizational culture, which Wainwright used to map where positive deviance might operate.
The top layer is artifacts — the visible things. The office layout, the dress code, the visible behaviors. Wainwright shared a personal example from a previous organization where he ran a small social experiment over three weeks. He went from wearing formal Italian trousers and ironed shirts to wearing t-shirts and shorts. Nobody followed. A week later, an email went out from HR establishing a dress code. His manager had seen him every day. His colleagues had seen him every day. Nobody had said anything directly. The response came through the formal channel, addressing the symptom without acknowledging the underlying question of why the dress code mattered in the first place.
The middle layer is espoused values — what the organization says it stands for. Innovation, customer focus, integrity, whatever appears on the wall plaque. Positive deviance at this layer challenges whether the organization actually lives the values it claims.
The deepest layer is underlying assumptions — the unexamined beliefs about how the world works and how the organization fits into it. Positive deviance at this layer is the hardest to practice because the assumptions are often invisible to the people holding them. They aren't experienced as assumptions. They're experienced as reality.
Positive deviants operate at all three layers, but the deepest work happens at the level of underlying assumptions. The dress code example is a surface-level test. The challenge to whether the organization actually values speaking up — or whether it punishes it while claiming to welcome it — is a deeper test. The question of whether the organization's basic operating model is the right one for the conditions it now faces is the deepest test of all.
Wainwright connected the framework back to a practice familiar to anyone in continuous improvement: gemba walks.
A good gemba walk and a bad gemba walk are operationally different in ways that map directly onto the positive deviance framework. A good gemba walk leaves people feeling listened to, supported, and ready to engage. Ideas flow. People feel that their input matters and that something will happen as a result of the conversation. A bad gemba walk leaves people feeling undermined, dismissed, and quietly resentful. The leader walked through. The leader asked some questions. Nothing changed. The signal sent is that gemba walks are theater.
The difference between the two is whether the leader treats the gemba as a place to gather information that will actually inform decisions, or as a place to perform leadership presence. The behaviors that distinguish them are the same behaviors that distinguish a rebel leader from a transactional one. Asking open questions. Encouraging constructive criticism and challenge. Being open and vulnerable about gaps in understanding. Following through on what gets surfaced. Showing that input has consequences.
A poorly delivered comment, a bad-tempered reaction, or a dismissive response can unravel months of culture work in a single interaction. The discipline of gemba in service of positive deviance requires constant attention to the message being sent in every exchange — not just the explicit content, but what the response to challenge or criticism reveals about whether challenge is actually welcome.
The same logic applies to how improvement projects get selected.
The default approach in many organizations is for executives to identify projects in a boardroom and assign them to teams to execute. This pattern produces predictable results. The teams have no ownership of the project, no input into whether the project is the right one, and often no belief that the project addresses what's actually broken. The energy required to execute is high. The likelihood of meaningful sustained improvement is low.
The alternative Wainwright described is to use data and feedback to surface areas where improvement might be valuable, and then allow the teams doing the work to develop their own objectives based on what they consider achievable and worth doing. The teams that select their own projects produce better results, because they have ownership from the start and they're working on problems they actually understand.
This requires allowing people to opt out. Wainwright was direct: you want a team of volunteers, not a crowd of victims. The people who don't want to engage with a particular improvement effort aren't the right people for that effort, and forcing them in doesn't produce better outcomes. The positive deviants in the organization will self-identify if you create the conditions where self-identifying is safe. The leadership job is to recognize them when they show up and give them the room and authority to actually do the work.
The argument running through this session is that positive deviance is a leadership and cultural achievement, not a software feature. The behaviors that nurture it — empowering people, lowering learning anxiety, treating challenge as information rather than threat, allowing teams to choose their own improvement projects — are human work that no platform performs on a leader's behalf.
What infrastructure does in this context is reduce the structural reasons that positive deviance fails to spread or sustain. A frontline employee who notices a better way of doing something has to have somewhere to put that observation where it will actually be seen and acted on. If the only available channel is a suggestion box that nobody reviews, or a conversation with a manager who has been trained to filter out anything that challenges established process, the deviance dies before it can produce a positive outcome. The organization never learns what its positive deviants were trying to teach it.
The empowerment work depends on visibility. People can't experience genuine self-determination if every decision has to go through layers of approval before anything moves. They can't experience meaningfulness if their contribution disappears into a void after they make it. They can't experience competence if their work is invisible to the people who decide what counts as competence in the organization. A shared system where improvement work, ideas, and outcomes are visible across the organization makes these conditions structurally easier to maintain than a system built on email and shared drives that nobody opens.
The project selection work that Wainwright described — teams choosing their own improvement projects from data about where the problems actually are — depends on the data being visible in the first place. Most organizations don't lack the data. They lack the structure that makes the data findable and actionable by the people who could use it. Infrastructure that surfaces operational data to the people doing the work, and that lets them propose and own improvement projects against that data, is the structural complement to the leadership behaviors that make positive deviance possible.
None of this changes what Wainwright was teaching. The leadership work is the work. The empowerment is the work. The willingness to lower learning anxiety rather than amplify survival anxiety is the work. What infrastructure does is keep the work from being eroded by the structural friction that makes good intentions fade between conversations.
What is positive deviance? Behavior that deviates from the norms of the reference group and has a positive effect on the organization. Both conditions have to be present. The behavior has to break established norms, and the outcome has to be positive. If the deviance produces harm, it isn't positive deviance — it's just deviance.
Why do traditional, fear-driven change efforts often backfire? Because amplifying survival anxiety triggers fight-or-flight responses that suppress the cognitive functions change actually requires. Creativity, openness, willingness to learn, and capacity to consider alternatives all shut down under high survival anxiety. The neurochemistry of survival is not the neurochemistry of innovation. People who feel their job is on the line don't innovate. They self-protect.
What's the difference between survival anxiety and learning anxiety? Survival anxiety is the fear that something fundamental is at stake — the business might fail, my job might disappear, I might get fired. Learning anxiety is the fear that I personally won't be able to handle what's being asked of me — I can't learn this, I'll lose status, I'm not capable. The two anxieties produce different reactions and require different responses. Most organizations amplify survival anxiety to drive change, when they should be lowering learning anxiety instead.
What is Edgar Schein's recommendation for managing change anxiety? Don't amplify survival anxiety. Lower learning anxiety. Keep survival anxiety at a level slightly higher than learning anxiety so the change still feels worth doing, but reduce the personal fear that will otherwise shut people down. Practical moves include providing a positive vision rather than only a negative one, supporting people with viable training, staying involved at every stage of the change, acknowledging informal learning, creating conditions for open speech, leading by example, and aligning structures to support the change rather than punish those who try.
What does a positive deviant look like in an organization? They challenge established norms, ask questions constantly, seek out perspectives different from their own, are comfortable being uncomfortable, look for invisible innovators that others overlook, learn through doing, make mistakes and keep going, allow others to opt out rather than coercing engagement, and let people discover their own solutions and then own them. They are usually labeled as troublemakers or rule-breakers by organizations that haven't yet recognized what they're contributing.
What's the difference between transactional and transformational leadership in the context of positive deviance? Transactional leadership operates through extrinsic rewards (carrots and sticks) and produces compliance that depends on the reward continuing to exist. Transformational leadership operates through intrinsic motivation and produces deeper engagement, but depends on the leader's vision being correct. Wainwright's argument is that neither alone is sufficient — what produces sustainable positive deviance is transformational leadership paired with genuine empowerment, where people have not just engagement but the structural authority to make decisions and act on what they see.
What is psychological empowerment? A motivational concept made up of four components: perceiving work as meaningful, believing in one's own competence to do the task, having a sense of self-determination over how the work gets done, and feeling control over outcomes. When these four components are in place, people take ownership of their work — and they deviate from the rules when deviation will produce better outcomes, because they understand what the rules are trying to accomplish and can see when the rules are getting in the way.
Why is the dress code example relevant? Because it shows how organizations respond to even small deviations from norms. Wainwright spent three weeks gradually shifting his attire at a previous employer. Nobody said anything directly. Then HR sent out an organization-wide email establishing a formal dress code. The response was about the symptom, not the underlying question. The example demonstrates how organizations often respond to deviance with rules rather than with curiosity, and how the willingness to challenge even surface-level norms can reveal something about the deeper culture.
How should improvement project selection change to support positive deviance? Use data and feedback to surface areas where improvement might be valuable, then allow the teams doing the work to develop their own objectives based on what they consider achievable and worth doing. Allow people to opt out — you want a team of volunteers, not a crowd of victims. The default pattern of executives selecting projects in a boardroom and assigning them to teams produces low ownership, low engagement, and low likelihood of sustained improvement. Teams that select their own projects produce better results because they have ownership from the start.
How do you build trust in an organization where it has been eroded? Through evidence and delivery. Trust is gained when leaders walk the walk — when they return on what they promised, when their behavior matches their stated values, when they follow through on commitments. Wainwright was direct that trust is built on delivery. There's no shortcut. If the team sees their leaders consistently acting in the interest of the organization and its people, the skepticism will gradually fade. If they don't, no amount of language about trust will substitute for the missing evidence.
What can you do if your organization punishes positive deviance? Wainwright was honest that the answer might be looking for a different job, but he also offered a more useful framing. Some positive deviants treat a "no" as a routing problem rather than a final answer — they look for an alternative path forward rather than giving up. Others recognize that some organizational cultures are too entrenched to change from below, and that the willingness to leave is itself a form of positive deviance. The question worth asking is whether the leadership team is genuinely willing to listen and change. If they aren't, the cost of trying to drive change against active suppression is usually higher than the cost of finding an environment where the work is possible.
How does positive deviance relate to continuous improvement and Lean? Toyota's production system was itself deviant relative to the manufacturing norms of its era. The history of Lean is largely a history of positive deviants — people willing to challenge established assumptions about how work should be organized, who turned out to be right in ways the established practitioners couldn't see at the time. The same dynamic continues to operate. The frontline workers who notice that the standard work isn't quite right, the supervisors who push back on a metric that's measuring the wrong thing, the CI leaders who challenge the boardroom strategy that doesn't fit the operational reality — all are doing the work of positive deviance, even when their organizations haven't yet recognized the contribution.
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