In today’s complex, messy environments—especially in higher education and mission-driven sectors—leaders are being asked to do more than “manage.” We’re being asked to shift culture, invite belonging, and solve problems that don’t have a clear path forward.
That’s why we need a new kind of leadership. One that is creative, contextual, and deeply human.
Enter the Deviant Symbol Leadership Model—a strengths-based, meaning-driven approach to leadership that aligns beautifully with design thinking. This model draws on positive deviance, semiotics, and StrengthsFinder to reframe how we identify problems, generate solutions, and scale change—not by imposing new systems, but by uncovering and amplifying what’s already working at the edges.
Why Design Thinking Needs Positive Deviance
Design thinking is rooted in human-centered problem solving. Its stages—empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test—rely on curiosity and iteration. But too often, design thinking assumes we’re starting from scratch or seeking external innovation.
Positive deviance flips that. It asks: Who’s already solving this problem from within the system? What can we learn from their behavior?
When paired with design thinking, positive deviance helps us:
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Empathize not just with users, but with successful outliers.
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Define problems based on what’s working—not just what’s broken.
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Ideate from lived, proven behaviors.
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Prototype symbolic, culturally resonant acts.
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Test with intention, storytelling, and sense-making.
This approach doesn’t just make solutions—it makes meaning. That’s where semiotics and Strengths come in.
Semiotics: Designing for Meaning
Semiotics—the study of symbols and cultural meaning—helps us understand how behaviors communicate values. In leadership, the smallest actions can carry outsized weight. Where you sit. What you repeat. Who you recognize.
In our Deviant Symbol model, we ask:
What does this action say to others?
By intentionally shaping meaning, leaders become designers of culture, not just managers of tasks.
Strengths: Designing for What Works
CliftonStrengths offers a language for what individuals do best. But its true power emerges when strengths are applied against the grain—in systems that don’t yet value them.
In this model, we use strengths not just for performance, but for strategic deviance. When someone with Empathy bends protocol to support a student more deeply, that’s a deviant act of leadership. When someone with Input quietly collects feedback no one asked for, they’re designing new insights from below.
We call this Strengths-Based Deviance—knowing your talent, reading the context, and choosing to act anyway.
The Deviant Symbol Leadership Toolkit
Here’s a toolkit to help leaders try this for themselves. It’s rooted in design thinking but grounded in human systems.
Cultural Symbols Decoder
Identify what behaviors mean inside your culture—and how to disrupt or reframe them with intention.
Strengths x Deviance Mapper
Explore how individual talents show up in countercultural ways—and design small, safe “experiments in deviance.”
Micro-Deviance Planner
Start where you are. Pick one small action that challenges a norm and signals a different value.
Narrative Activation Guide
Capture and tell stories of those who quietly made things better. These stories become blueprints for change.
Deviant Leadership = Design in Action
What makes the Deviant Symbol approach work is that it lives in the real world. It’s not a re-org. It’s not a dashboard. It’s not 17 new metrics.
It’s one person using their strengths to challenge a cultural assumption, in a way that is understandable and inspiring to others.
And then doing it again.
In this model, leadership is not a position—it’s a practice of intentional deviance, rooted in empathy, powered by personal strength, and amplified by meaning.
Final Thought
Design thinking gave us a process.
Positive deviance gave us a direction.
Semiotics gave us the why.
Strengths gave us the how.
Together, they invite a more courageous, compassionate form of leadership—one that’s already alive in your culture, just waiting to be seen.