How agreements shape SME ecosystems.

Most organizations operate within familiar patterns: standard practices, accepted trade-offs, and common explanations for success and failure. Yet, in nearly every business ecosystem, a small number of actors consistently achieve better outcomes — not by having more resources, but by working differently.

Positive deviance refers to these uncommon practices that emerge under the same constraints as everyone else. In my research, I examine how certain SME businesses deviate from dominant agreement patterns in ways that build regenerative capacity: stronger relationships, clearer decisions, and healthier long-term outcomes for both the firm and its ecosystem.

Rather than asking what should be done, positive deviance asks a more precise question: Which practices already work — and why do they remain the exception?

Organizations don’t run on strategy alone. They run on agreements — explicit and implicit — about who decides, what counts as success, what gets rewarded, and who absorbs risk when reality hits. Most of these agreements are not written down. They are enacted.

In my work, “deviant agreements” are the structural differences that explain why some organizations outperform the norm in non-extractive ways. They don’t just behave better; they coordinate differently — often through small shifts that change decision quality, trust, and value flows across stakeholders.

The practical question is not “Do we have good values?” but: Which agreements are actually steering our system — and what outcomes do they reliably produce?

Flourishing is easy to praise and hard to test. That’s why I model it. Not to reduce life to numbers, but to make causal claims accountable.

This thread explores how agreement patterns generate feedback loops: some amplify learning and regenerative capacity under stress, others quietly accumulate fragility and coordination debt. Modeling helps distinguish what is plausible from what is structurally likely — and surfaces trade-offs before they turn into damage.

The core aim is simple: Move from inspiring language to a testable understanding of what makes systems healthier over time.

Many practices look successful in one context and fail when copied elsewhere. Scaling regeneration is not about replicating programs; it is about identifying what can travel: agreements, decision rules, and relational conditions that allow regenerative outcomes to keep emerging.

This thread engages with the realities of SME business ecosystems: multiple actors, uneven power, conflicting incentives, and long time horizons. The challenge is to scale what works without freezing it into a template or shifting hidden costs onto others.

The guiding question is: What can be scaled as a pattern, and what must remain locally crafted?

An agreement field is the infrastructure of coordination in an ecosystem: the patterned set of explicit and implicit agreements that shape how resources, authority, meaning, and relationships move.

I use agreement fields to understand why similar initiatives lead to different outcomes, why good intentions backfire, and why stress reveals a system’s real priorities. Mapping agreement fields turns invisible structures into something that can be discussed, compared, and redesigned with care.

This is the backbone of the PhD: If you want different outcomes, you have to change the field that generates them.