Mette Sønderskov, Ingjerd Thon Hagaseth and Arvind Singhal
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Enabling interactive knowledge mobilisation through the positive deviance (PD) approach for youth inclusion in Norway’.
About fifty years ago, the epidemiologist Archibald Cochrane recounted a conversation with a crematorium worker that feels hauntingly relevant today. When asked what fascinated him most about his profession, the man replied, ‘The way in which so much goes in, and so little comes out’.
In the world of evidence-informed policy, we are currently standing at the doors of a similar furnace. We invest staggering amounts of intellectual and financial capital into research, yet the practical yield remains frustratingly slim. We produce mountains of data, but very little of it translates into the lived experience of the communities it is meant to serve. The ‘knowledge-to-action’ gap isn’t just a crack in the pavement; it’s a canyon.
The traditional solution to this problem has been a ‘transfer model’. Experts generate knowledge in a controlled environment and then ‘export’ it to policymakers. When the evidence fails to take root in policy and practice, the diagnosis is almost always a lack of effective dissemination or a need for ‘stricter’ implementation. But this linear logic ignores a fundamental truth: knowledge is not a package to be delivered; it is a relationship to be cultivated.
The power of the positive outlier
If we want to stop the incineration of useful ideas, we must turn the traditional hierarchy on its head. This is where the Positive Deviance (PD) approach enters the conversation – not just as a tool, but as an approach, a method, a philosophy.
PD starts with a radical premise: In every community or organisation, there are certain individuals or groups whose uncommon behaviours and strategies enable them to find better solutions to problems than their peers, while having access to the exact same resources and facing the same challenges. Instead of asking, ‘What is the global best practice?’ we begin by asking: ‘Who is already succeeding here, against all odds?’
From knowing to doing
Conventional change management assumes a ‘Knowledge–Attitude–Practice’ pathway. We think that if we give people the right facts (Knowledge), they will change their minds (Attitude), and then change their behaviour (Practice). Decades of dismal outcomes suggest this is backwards.
The PD approach reverses the flow into a Practice–Attitude–Knowledge pathway. It posits that people are much more likely to ‘act their way into a new way of thinking’ than to ‘think their way into a new way of acting’. By identifying small, concrete practices already working locally – like the specific ways a frontline worker in a Norwegian municipality successfully engages marginalised youth – and enabling peers to adapt them, we bypass the resistance that usually greets ‘expert’ interference.
Scaling through adaptation, not replication
In our study of PD and youth exclusion in six Norwegian municipalities, we saw this shift in real-time. When participants stopped looking for an actionable blueprint and started looking at the successes of their own colleagues, the air in the room changed. The role of the researcher or policymaker shifted from a ‘prescriber of solutions’ to a ‘facilitator of discovery’.
This insight reframes our entire understanding of ‘scaling’. Previously, scaling meant replicating a fixed, rigid model. In a PD approach, scaling is an iterative process of translation. The answer is not to be copied; it is to be spread through the process of discovery.
To close the gap between what we know and what we do, ‘evidence’ is not to be force-fed to a sceptical public. Instead, quiet successes already happening in the shadows of our systems need to be identified. The most transformative knowledge isn’t something we need to build; it’s something to be uncovered.
Image credit: Photo by Ivan Dostál on Unsplash
Read the original research in Evidence & Policy:
Sønderskov, M. Hagaseth, I.T. & Singhal, A. (2026). Enabling interactive knowledge mobilisation through the positive deviance (PD) approach for youth inclusion in Norway. Evidence & Policy, DOI: 10.1332/17442648Y2026D000000086.
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