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'Deviant' new ideas sorely needed to solve our problems
By Wang Yong |
May 7, 2011, Saturday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
IN this age of cars, only a deviant would praise a bicycle.
Yet the Shanghai Metro authority has lately lent an ear to the deviant wisdom of cyclists.
It has posted signs in many stations, praising the bicycle as having "zero emission, zero pollution, and a panoramic roof."
Indeed, can any car, however fancy or expensive, beat a bicycle in terms of zero emission, zero pollution or panoramic roof? Never.
Shanghai Metro authority's promotion of something exceptional to the norm - in this case a bicycle in an age of cars - provides a footnote to the book, "The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems" (Harvard Business Press, 2010).
Authors Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin write, "Information has a social life, and unless new insights are embedded in the social system, they evaporate."
In the bicycle case, it may or may not be the Metro authority's own initiative, but the authority is no doubt part of the city's collective effort to heed the voice of cyclists, however "deviant" that voice may seem to be.
As the book suggests, every society has a few people who have solved issues that vex everyone else. "In the most impossible of circumstances, usually someone, somewhere, has figured out a way to cope."
Indeed, some people already live the answers to their problems daily. What's needed is for a society to discover those people and spread their voices.
For example, many foreigners in Shanghai just ride a bicycle to take their children to and from school.
They are not mired in the traffic mess that traps many Chinese parents who drive their children to and from school in an ostentatious show of status, if not outright vanity.
These foreigners already live the answers to Shanghai's traffic jam and pollution. Unfortunately, they're only a bunch of minnows compared with the car-driving whales.
If the bicycle promotion appears in more places, for example, schools, cinemas, parks, news stands, office buildings and supermarkets, it won't be long before citizens reach a consensus on the merit of bicycles.
See how quickly luxury goods ads that litter the city have helped turn a formerly deviant idea (a luxury lifestyle) into a dominant belief in many parts of China today.
Just as it can catapult a bad deviant idea to stardom, a society can elevate a good deviant idea to sanctity. It all depends on which way a society wishes to go.
Now that it has taken a first step in spreading the idea of a beautiful life on a bicycle, the Shanghai Metro authority should consider setting up a special passage for cyclists to take compact bikes on board. Today they are banned.
So much for bicycles. Now about fertilizer.
Night soil
One day last week, my wife and I traveled to rural Hangzhou and lodged in a farmer's inn, where we often smelled the "flavor" of night soil and animal waste that was so familiar to us 30 years ago but is now so strange.
That day, I took a deep sniff and took heart that we were living in an area free from the harm of chemical fertilizer.
In my childhood in the 1970s, I would often see farmers collecting night soil at public toilets in my city. Almost every public toilet had a waste pit beside it - black gold for farmers. At that time, few Chinese people, whether in cities or in the countryside, had heard of a flush toilet.
Now, with the aid of a flush toilet and in the name of progress, most cities have dispatched night soil to nowhere, representing a huge loss to farmers who increasingly rely on chemical fertilizer. Instead of being used a fertilizer, night soil has become a water pollutant.
Chemical fertilizers have increased production, but they have not enhanced health. Its heavy and extensive use harms us all.
Had cities saved their night soil, farmers would not have to use so much chemical fertilizer.
Can our cities heed my deviant idea of returning some of our black gold of waste to our friends in the countryside?
Don't sniff at my suggestion before you read the book on the power of positive deviance. It offers many case studies that echo Chairman Mao Zedong's saying that truth sometimes lies in the hands of a few.
Consider one case.
In the early 1990s, many Vietnamese children age five or younger suffered from malnutrition during a rice shortage. But some children of impoverished families were well nourished.
They ate the same tiny amount of rice as other children, but their deviant mothers fed them tiny shrimps and crabs found in rice paddies - violating the traditional belief that small children should never eat such things.
This deviant practice soon became a national norm after it became evident that the children were thriving on that diet. A few deviant mothers literally solved a country's food shortage.
Yet the Shanghai Metro authority has lately lent an ear to the deviant wisdom of cyclists.
It has posted signs in many stations, praising the bicycle as having "zero emission, zero pollution, and a panoramic roof."
Indeed, can any car, however fancy or expensive, beat a bicycle in terms of zero emission, zero pollution or panoramic roof? Never.
Shanghai Metro authority's promotion of something exceptional to the norm - in this case a bicycle in an age of cars - provides a footnote to the book, "The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems" (Harvard Business Press, 2010).
Authors Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin write, "Information has a social life, and unless new insights are embedded in the social system, they evaporate."
In the bicycle case, it may or may not be the Metro authority's own initiative, but the authority is no doubt part of the city's collective effort to heed the voice of cyclists, however "deviant" that voice may seem to be.
As the book suggests, every society has a few people who have solved issues that vex everyone else. "In the most impossible of circumstances, usually someone, somewhere, has figured out a way to cope."
Indeed, some people already live the answers to their problems daily. What's needed is for a society to discover those people and spread their voices.
For example, many foreigners in Shanghai just ride a bicycle to take their children to and from school.
They are not mired in the traffic mess that traps many Chinese parents who drive their children to and from school in an ostentatious show of status, if not outright vanity.
These foreigners already live the answers to Shanghai's traffic jam and pollution. Unfortunately, they're only a bunch of minnows compared with the car-driving whales.
If the bicycle promotion appears in more places, for example, schools, cinemas, parks, news stands, office buildings and supermarkets, it won't be long before citizens reach a consensus on the merit of bicycles.
See how quickly luxury goods ads that litter the city have helped turn a formerly deviant idea (a luxury lifestyle) into a dominant belief in many parts of China today.
Just as it can catapult a bad deviant idea to stardom, a society can elevate a good deviant idea to sanctity. It all depends on which way a society wishes to go.
Now that it has taken a first step in spreading the idea of a beautiful life on a bicycle, the Shanghai Metro authority should consider setting up a special passage for cyclists to take compact bikes on board. Today they are banned.
So much for bicycles. Now about fertilizer.
Night soil
One day last week, my wife and I traveled to rural Hangzhou and lodged in a farmer's inn, where we often smelled the "flavor" of night soil and animal waste that was so familiar to us 30 years ago but is now so strange.
That day, I took a deep sniff and took heart that we were living in an area free from the harm of chemical fertilizer.
In my childhood in the 1970s, I would often see farmers collecting night soil at public toilets in my city. Almost every public toilet had a waste pit beside it - black gold for farmers. At that time, few Chinese people, whether in cities or in the countryside, had heard of a flush toilet.
Now, with the aid of a flush toilet and in the name of progress, most cities have dispatched night soil to nowhere, representing a huge loss to farmers who increasingly rely on chemical fertilizer. Instead of being used a fertilizer, night soil has become a water pollutant.
Chemical fertilizers have increased production, but they have not enhanced health. Its heavy and extensive use harms us all.
Had cities saved their night soil, farmers would not have to use so much chemical fertilizer.
Can our cities heed my deviant idea of returning some of our black gold of waste to our friends in the countryside?
Don't sniff at my suggestion before you read the book on the power of positive deviance. It offers many case studies that echo Chairman Mao Zedong's saying that truth sometimes lies in the hands of a few.
Consider one case.
In the early 1990s, many Vietnamese children age five or younger suffered from malnutrition during a rice shortage. But some children of impoverished families were well nourished.
They ate the same tiny amount of rice as other children, but their deviant mothers fed them tiny shrimps and crabs found in rice paddies - violating the traditional belief that small children should never eat such things.
This deviant practice soon became a national norm after it became evident that the children were thriving on that diet. A few deviant mothers literally solved a country's food shortage.
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