Positive Deviance: How Association Boards Can Pivot from Risk Avoidance to Intelligent Failure

Picture a power outage. Most people wait in the dark. One lights a candle. 

That simple act reflects positive deviance: people who move forward while others stay stuck under the same constraints. For association boards facing stalled growth or incremental progress, this mindset offers a path forward. But it requires something many boards resist: a willingness to embrace intelligent failure. 

When Associations Get Stuck 

If your association feels stuck, you're not alone. Many association boards face similar challenges: revenues struggle to keep pace with expenses, slowly declining membership, programming that stays the same year after year. Boards often feel competitors are pulling ahead while they stand still. 

The response is often a call to innovate, a new committee or a strategic planning session. These may seem like the right steps, but they don’t always bring change.  

The issue isn’t a lack of ideas. It’s a culture that prioritizes avoiding failure over enabling learning. 

When new ideas surface, boards often ask: 

• What if it doesn’t work? 
• Has anyone else tried this? 
• Can we test it safely first? 

These questions feel responsible, but over time they signal to other board members and staff that risk is unacceptable. The result is an organization that values innovation in theory but avoids it in practice. 

Understanding Positive Deviance 

Positive deviance shifts the focus from avoiding problems to learning from outliers. Instead of asking, “How do we minimize risk?” it asks: Who is succeeding under the same conditions and what are they doing differently? 

For association boards, this means shifting focus from what the rest of the industry is doing to studying outliers: programs that outperform expectations, associations that thrive in tough environments, chapters that engage members in new ways and ideas that succeed despite contradicting conventional thinking. 

But this approach only works if boards allow for experimentation. That requires some risk, understanding that not every idea will work and being willing to try anyway. 

The Intelligent Failure  

Not all failures are equal. High-performing organizations distinguish between three types: 

1. Preventable failures are breakdowns in execution, not experimentation. Things like missed deadlines or failure to follow set processes can be prevented through better systems and accountability.  

2. Complex failures result from unpredictable conditions, like market shifts or external pressures. Associations can’t always prevent these failures, but they can mitigate some of them by adapting as conditions change.  

3. Intelligent failures are well-designed experiments that test new ideas and generate insight, even when the results fall short of expectations.  

Intelligent failures are: 

• Intentional and hypothesis-driven 
• A major shift in the way associations think and operate 
• Designed to produce learning, not just outcomes 
• Structured to capture and apply insights 

Tests that may end in intelligent failures include piloting a radically different membership model in one small region an association serves or testing a new conference format for a subset of attendees to better understand changing preferences.  

They are not reckless risks. They are disciplined experiments that help organizations adapt and grow. 

Psychological Safety for Board Innovation 

To embrace intelligent failure, boards must create a culture where people feel safe to take smart risks. This means creating an environment where learning is valued over blame.  

When results of a new program fall short of expectations, the conversation focuses on who approved the initiative or why they thought it was a good idea in the first place. In a board with a culture of psychological safety, the questions focus on learning and improving for the future: 

• What did we learn? 
• What surprised us? 
• What would we do differently next time? 
• How do we use what we learned to inform other initiatives? 

This intentional shift requires talking about the role of experimentation in strategy, clear structures for identifying intelligent from preventable failures and modeling by leadership. It also means celebrating well-designed experiments that produce valuable insights even when results disappoint. 

Setting Your Association Up for Intelligent, Not Preventable, Failure 

How can boards decide which experiments to pursue and which to avoid? Use clear criteria to evaluate each idea before you begin. 

Boards should move forward with experiments when the initiative addresses a true strategic unknown and is grounded in a clear hypothesis. Success should be defined by what you learn, not just by financial return. That means having a plan in place to capture insights and share them across the organization. It also requires thoughtful guardrails, ensuring that even if the experiment doesn’t succeed, it won’t put the association’s reputation at risk. 

On the other hand, boards should pause or reconsider when the answer is already available in existing data or when there is no clear hypothesis guiding the effort. If success is defined only by immediate financial outcomes, or if there’s no plan to evaluate results and capture lessons learned, the experiment is unlikely to deliver meaningful value. 

This approach ensures experimentation is purposeful, not random. 

What Matters Most

One of the most powerful decisions boards make is what they measure. Traditional association metrics like membership counts, revenue, event attendance, subscriptions or credential renewals reflect past performance but don't always inform future success. 

Boards focused on growth should also track: 

• The number of new ideas tested 
• Percentage of unique ideas versus incremental improvements 
• Insights gained from successes and failures 
• Comfort level with experimentation 

These indicators reveal whether the organization is building the capacity to adapt. 

A Practical Example  

Here’s an example of what innovation looks like when a board is comfortable with embracing the risk of intelligent failure.  

An association facing declining engagement from early-career professionals had tried several approaches to engage them. They tried adding student chapters, reducing membership fees, and sending targeted communications, but engagement didn’t improve. 

Instead of refining existing programs, they tested a new model with a small group based on the hypothesis that early-career professionals weren't engaging because the association’s focus on sharing information through conferences and publications doesn't match how they prefer to learn or connect with one another. 

They offered 50 early career non-members access to new services including peer mentoring, micro-credentials and digital-first engagement.  

Only 10 percent of the test group converted to paying members at the end of the pilot program, making it a failure by traditional success measures. However, the insights the board gained reshaped their approach. Over time, early-career membership grew significantly.  

The experiment worked because the board framed it as a learning exercise, decided to pursue it without guarantees of immediate results and built in a plan to capture insights regardless of outcome. 

The Choice Ahead 

Boards face a clear choice: Continue optimizing existing approaches or build the ability to learn and adapt faster than change itself. 

Intelligent failure is not about lowering standards. It’s about strengthening decision-making through real-world insight. 

The question isn’t whether your board can afford to experiment. 

It’s whether you can afford not to.