Mark Munger
Mark Munger is a distinguished global practitioner, educator, and innovator in the Positive Deviance (PD) movement – the globally recognized approach to complex social change developed originally in partnership with Tufts University’s Institute for Global Leadership. For more than two decades, his work has helped establish Positive Deviance not merely as a method, but as a moral orientation to problem-solving: solutions already exist in the community, among the least expected groups, and the work is to discover, amplify, and operationalize them.
His involvement with Tufts IGL and EPIIC circles back to the era when the Positive Deviance Initiative was housed at the Institute for Global Leadership. Through that nexus, Mark worked with generations of students, faculty, and public sector partners, advancing PD as a rigorous alternative to top-down expertise. He became an influential mentor and collaborator inside the IGL community, particularly in areas where complexity science, social change, and field-based learning intersected.
Today, his portfolio is both global and local – and always anchored in lived systems.
Mark is currently leading a major effort funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to transform classroom practice in Long Beach, California by discovering what outlier teachers are doing right, and scaling that learning systemically. He continues his work in Denmark, originally through the Ministry of Justice, now expanding into mental health, drug use, and corrections. Denmark’s deep democratic reflex – the reflex of believing citizens already possess the capacity to solve their own problems – makes Positive Deviance a particularly resonant method there. That partnership has now led to the founding of the Positive Deviance Academy of Denmark, in alignment with the Copenhagen Business School.
Closer to home, he is currently working with Novartis Oncology to examine how PD can strengthen the design and execution of clinical trials for widespread disease and raredistributed clinical states. His newest frontier is applying PD to food sourcing and food preparation in low- income communities, both rural and urban – bringing the method full circle to everyday survival challenges.
His intellectual network spans complexity science communities including Plexus Institute, where he has helped advance method, narrative, and praxis in human systems.
Mark is also a teacher of teachers, and a mentor of leaders. He is known for his generosity, his reflective spirit, his curiosity, and a deeply democratic professional ethic.
His educational background includes advanced study in public policy, organizational behavior, and social systems – training that he has consistently translated into field practice rather than theory.
He and his wife Kate are based part of the year in midcoast Maine, in an old farmhouse that has become a gathering space of children, grandchildren, and colleagues. Their daughter Amelia is a litigator in New York, their daughter Hannah teaches fourth grade in Brooklyn, and their son Will is a chef in Portland, Maine.
Through it all, Mark remains in active dialogue with students, with Tufts IGL alumni, with EPIIC alumni, and with systems that are under pressure. He remains a builder of capacity, a discoverer of hidden solutions, a translator across disciplines, and a champion of democratic problem-solving.
His enduring contribution is simple but profound:
Mark Munger believes that the world’s most intractable problems cannot be solved by hiring smart outsiders – but by revealing and learning from the invisible brilliance already alive inside the community itself.