An Interview with Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker
Authors of
The Deviant’s Advantage: How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets
Why did you want to write a book about deviance?
We actually started by thinking about innovation and how it happens in society and business. The more we looked, the more we saw innovation as deviance—someone or something operating in a defined measure from the norm. By definition, then, everything that is different is deviant. Of course, there is positive and negative deviance—the former a force for transformation, the latter a source of unspeakable evil. We’re concerned with positive deviance, the kind of transformational change that takes fringe ideas and morphs them into mass markets.
Just about every manager will say that innovative products and services are their lifeblood. If everyone has innovation on their mind? What’s the problem?
The mistake we saw many people making is that while they thought they were ahead of the curve on trends, the reality was that the train had already left the station. They were picking up on innovation at a fairly mature stage when the real opportunity to intercept it came much earlier in its life cycle. We saw that companies unafraid of what we call the Edge and the Fringe were picking up on and commercializing people and ideas before they became mainstream.
If businesses are going to fully capitalize on innovation, they need to free themselves from the shackles of conventional business thought. By understanding that all innovation is a departure from the norm, you begin to understand how to exploit it. Deviant thinking then loses its pejorative connotations and becomes something businesses ought to seek out.
How do you see the ideas in the book as helpful to business leaders who are looking for answers right now?
If they want instant answers it’s not the right book for them. People in business need to step back and see the business world not as an island unto itself but as part of a larger society. Business is nothing more or less than one expression of a culture in the same way art, science, language, and our attitudes about sexuality, faith, war, and governance are direct expressions of our attitudes about culture. We believe culture leads business and that businesses that want to stay tuned in to innovation need to be tuned in to the larger culture around them. Business has a natural tendency toward inbreeding, and we know what happens when cousins marry.
Okay, you’re not giving them instant answers. What’s practical about The Deviant’s Advantage?
To paraphrase Einstein, there’s nothing as useful as a simple framework. The future breakthrough product or idea for every business is way out there on the Fringe—raw, messy, and untamed. In some form it’s going to move to the Edge, the Realm of the Cool, the Next Big Thing, and finally Social Convention.
Our model helps people look at both society and business in innovative ways. In the book we try to spur thinking by looking at different social phenomenon such as Christian fundamentalism. Not so long ago the evangelical Christian movement was on the edge or fringe of society. In the 1950s its members were primarily rural, not particularly well educated and politically powerless. Many of its ministers were itinerants preaching in tents and handling snakes. Today of course many fundamentalists are middle and upper middle class; the churches have enormous memberships, and are wealthy and politically powerful. The evangelicals have moved through each stage of the model and are now squarely part of social convention.
Can you give a specific business example about the move from the fringe to social convention?
About the time Sam Walton was getting his business off the ground, the chairman of Sears, Roebuck opined in a speech at Northwestern University that there is no growth in retailing. As a deviant thinker, Walton saw a market that conventional thinkers like the Sears chairman completely missed: lower-income people who longed for the pleasantries of middle-class life. It was an untapped market located in small towns that companies like Sears weren’t giving a second thought to. Walton found a way to give these folks what they wanted. Not only that, he treated them with respect, and made a lot of money in the process. The rest is history. One of the largest businesses in the world was built in an industry “that had no growth potential.” There’s a Wal-Mart-like opportunity for every company, but using the conventional wisdom of your industry won’t help you find it. We bet it’s even true in book publishing, an industry mired in the conventional wisdom of no growth.
What sets this book apart from other books about innovation?
The Deviant’s Advantage is the first book to tackle the issue of where innovation truly begins and what happens to it after the innovation has fallen from popular fashion. While other books have described a discrete phase of the innovative process, The Deviant’s Advantage is the first—and only—book that provides a template for understanding the full evolution of innovation. Let’s take an innovation like tattooing. When Europeans first encountered tattooed “primitives” in places like the Pacific, they were convinced that these tattooed people were barely human—the true Fringe of the species. But eventually the sailors began to adopt the idea of body art for themselves. This acceptance moved tattooing to the Edge, sailors hardly being respectable people. When the members of the Greatest Generation fought their war, many returned with tattoos celebrating their loved ones, their duty stations, their units, or just a bad weekend in town. These weren’t marginal members of society but men and women who returned to be doctors, lawyers, accountants and other pillars of society. The tattoo had subtly entered the Realm of the Cool. Tattoos became the Next Big Thing at the same time they became de rigueur among celebrities like Cher. Finally they’ve arrived at Social Convention. Today the untattooed teenager
is the deviant.
How do you personally stay tapped into what’s on the fringe?
The only way you can, by being actively engaged and open to all life’s possibilities. It helps to get out of your comfort zone—as often as possible. In our cases this involves hanging out at independent music stores, “people watching” at malls and on the streets, surfing obscure websites on the Internet. It also means staying in touch with where you came from. For Ryan this is the world of poetry slams, avant-garde visual art, blues and jazz clubs, and Harley-Davidson rallies. For Watts, it’s returning to Montana every year to work as a cowboy and escorting women into Planned Parenthood clinics.
Explain the concept of the Abolition of Context and how it relates to deviance and innovation.
The path from the Fringe (where innovation is born) to Social Convention (where mass markets are created) is moving so fast that the process of change is becoming iterative. Traditionally we had an established order, or context. An eventual innovation first challenged and later replaced that context, becoming the new established order until another wave of change happened along. Today, change happens before context is formed.
This Abolition of Context makes it very difficult for anyone—individuals or businesses – to maintain their balance, perspective and direction. In fact, change is occurring so quickly that the Abolition of Context actually leads to a point where the opposite of a truth becomes the truth. This helps explain the rise of relativism—where the norm is that there is no norm—from situational ethics to complexity theory in physics.