The Positive Outlier Study Method
Study your best performers, not your average, to raise the whole curve
Traditional statistics and organizational psychology teach us to eliminate outliers and study the average. This creates what Achor calls the cult of the average: if you study what is merely average, you will remain merely average. The Positive Outlier Study Method flips this approach by intentionally identifying people who are far above the curve in performance, resilience, creativity, or well-being and studying what they do differently.
Instead of asking how fast the average child learns to read, you ask why certain children learn exceptionally fast. Instead of trying to bring underperformers up to mediocre, you study your stars to discover transferable practices that can raise the entire average. This is a fundamentally different lens for talent development, education, and organizational psychology that produces outsized returns because it unlocks potential rather than merely patching deficiency.
- If you study what is merely average, you will remain merely average
- Positive outliers contain transferable practices that can raise the entire curve
- The question is not how to move people up to average but how to move the entire average up
- Eliminating outliers makes sense for drug dosages but destroys insight into human potential
- Identify Your Positive OutliersLook across your team, organization, or community and identify the people who are significantly above the curve on the metrics that matter most. These are not just high performers by numbers but people who demonstrate exceptional resilience, creativity, energy, humor, or well-being. Create a list of 3-5 individuals whose performance or attitude seems to defy the conditions.Pro tipLook beyond traditional KPIs; sometimes the most important outliers excel at soft metrics like team morale or creative problem-solving
- Study Their Practices and MindsetsConduct deep interviews or observations of your positive outliers. Ask them about their daily routines, how they handle stress, what they do differently when facing the same challenges as their peers, and what beliefs or habits they attribute to their success. Look for patterns across multiple outliers rather than assuming one person has all the answers.Pro tipAsk about failures too; outliers often have a distinctive relationship with failure that fuels their resilienceWarningAvoid survivorship bias by also considering whether external advantages explain the outlier status
- Systematize and Teach Transferable PracticesExtract the practices that are learnable and transferable. Not every outlier trait can be taught, but many daily habits, reframing techniques, and decision-making approaches can be packaged into training or cultural norms. Pilot these practices with a small group, measure the impact, and then scale across the organization to raise the entire baseline.Pro tipFrame these as experiments rather than mandates; people adopt practices more readily when they feel like participants in discovery
Rather than studying average employee engagement or productivity, Achor entered companies and asked why certain employees were high above the curve in terms of intellectual ability, creativity, energy levels, and resilience. He studied these positive outliers to identify transferable practices like gratitude journaling and positive experience recording.
Achor developed this approach during his academic work at Harvard where he noticed that psychology and statistics courses systematically taught students to eliminate outliers to find lines of best fit. While useful for determining drug dosages for average populations, this approach was actively harmful when applied to human potential, happiness, productivity, and creativity. By studying the weirdos above the curve rather than deleting them as measurement errors, Achor found that their practices could be systematized and taught to entire populations.