Why mistfits are key to your cultural mix with Alf Rehn

Alf Rehn is a professor of innovation, design, and management at the University of Southern Denmark, and is recognised as a thoughtleader in the field of innovation and creativity.

In addition to being an academic, he is a bestselling author, a strategic advisor, a board professional, and a globally active keynote speaker. For more, see alfrehn.com or connect with Alf on LinkedIn.

-Alf Rehn speaks to Kate Hodsdon.

A new understanding of your most valuable resource

“Sure, she has a great portfolio and the competencies we need, but I am just a bit worried whether she’s the right fit for our culture. Her views were somewhat contrarian in quite a few of the questions I asked.”

“Yeah, I was thinking the same. She came across as quite confrontational in the interview, and I think it is important that we retain our team culture of psychological safety.

“So she’s a no, then? We’re going for Bob?”

“Yeah, I think he’ll fit in well with the team.”

The conversation above is made up, but its sentiment is still alive in organisations today. Hiring a corporate bod? Not a problem. Hiring someone conventionally creative? Still fairly easy. A contrarian? Hang on, what exactly do you mean? Let’s not go crazy.

Leaders have become so enamoured with the values-aligned harmonious company culture and ever-elusive notion of “cultural fit” that many organisations suffer from not just a lack of healthy DEI, but a critical lack of contrarians.

The result? Organisations with hard-working, earnest, and dependable corporates and creatives, and almost no creative friction or innovation potential. With culture, fit is as important as misfit.

Just to serve as an illustration, let’s imagine that contemporary organisations have three archetypal forms of workers – corporates, creatives, and contrarians. The corporates are the core of the organisation. They’re the kind of people who do what they are asked to do and do it well, and who fulfill the tasks that take care of business. They may not always be dazzling, but without them, the company would fold within a week. The creatives – again generalising to make a case – often do the more showy kind of work in the business – think branding, comms, design, marketing, and all things digital, etc. They use their creative capabilities to support the corporates, and bring in a level of novel thinking that can both support the way a business operates, and breathe a little razzmatazz in to the mix.

What is often forgotten in all this is that there is a third archetype, one which goes against the grain of the first two. This category is regularly overlooked, frequently disliked, generally misunderstood and at times, simply despised (and then fired). In my experience working in innovation, contrarians are often perceived as the ultimate enemy of a cultural cohesion, and the smooth running of a corporation. This is far from wise for leaders today.

What makes a contrarian, contrarian?

As a word, “contrarian” evokes a plethora of emotions and reactions. To some, it refers to an iconoclast, someone brave enough to say the unsayable, or do what few of us would ever dare. Thinking about the likes of Christopher Hitchens (one of the most outspoken writers of all time); Germaine Greer (famous feminist and author of The Female Eunuch); Anita Roddick (who founded of The Body Shop decades before vegan beauty and natural skincare became a norm); Warren Buffet (the world’s fifth richest man and founder of Berkshire Hathaway is what’s called a “contrarian investor”); and then there’s Michael Burry (the investor who The Big Short was based on). To others a contrarian is a troublemaker, someone who challenges you and disagrees out of stubbornness, arrogance, or bloody- mindedness. There’s a tendency to view contrarians as innately confrontational, however, this does not fully grasp the contrarian mindset.

It is this misunderstanding and misrepresentation that leads so few organisations to actively seek out contrarians when hiring, and why the value of the contrarians they do have lurking around seldom benefits the business – who wants a confrontational colleague on their team? Rather few, it seems.

Some think that creatives are contrarians, but I’d challenge that. Most creatives take direction from corporates (i.e., leaders and the board) without pushing back or challenging assumptions). They work in a systematic way that follows fairly standard processes. It’s only contrarians who can shake things up for either of them. Corporates feel threatened and annoyed by a contrarian’s questioning, yet without that type of unconventional energy, don’t wonder if you’re not truly innovating.

We all know the story: throughout history, organisations and institutions have been built by people with a unitary vision and a shared purpose, led by people who could establish this – corporates and creatives together. When we look to the great organisations of the past, this is what we often think about; they had a commitment to an idea, the steadfast pursuit of an ideal, and the absence of doubt. Great companies back then had great cultures, ones where people were aligned and wholeheartedly “all in.”.

That’s a nice story, suitable for a historical epic or a series on Netflix, but it is a rather simplistic way to consider culture and organisations. Almost all organisations – past, present, and future – comprise people who follow the script, toe the line, and accept the company narrative.

This is where contrarians come in. Whereas many still think that history is made by great leaders, who craft great stories, true change agents are a tiny minority who opt to go against the grain and challenge why “the way we do it around here” has ended up a kind of organisational holy grail. They are the ones asking why things have to be a certain way, or asking why best practice for one means best practice for all.

Leaders might not always say this out loud, but the really great ones tend either to be contrarians themselves (such as Gandhi), or expertly capture the value that contrarians offer. Who other than Steve Jobs would think a black-and-white TV ad that features Gandhi might just be the best way to sell computers?

Understanding contrarians

Throughout the history of innovation, one single fact has held true, again and again. The most powerful agents of change and renewal have never been those who most embraced the existing company culture, but have rather been those who have dared to question the very same. Neither Spencer Silver nor Arthur Fry were what you’d call “true believers” when it came to 3M, yet they created the PostIt note. Steve Jobs, for all his personal flaws, resisted almost all notions of “proper business logic” that permeated his time(s). Few CEOs in fashion would agree with Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard who encourages customers not to buy more clothes from them just for the sake of it. Please, the environmentalist begs, use one of our repair kits, or send whatever you can’t fix back to us so we can do it for you.

Whilst it is not something that we tend to emphasise in business books, the people who produce great innovation and enact great change are quite often a bit difficult, a tad ornery, and somewhat idiosyncratic. They are often allowed to be so because someone has recognised that despite being less than easy to work with, they can generate huge value by way of being contrarian. Often, contrarians get labelled as narcissists, perfectionists, or lone rangers who aren’t collaborative. According to statistics, there will be some who do indeed tick those boxes, but generally, they’re not. They’re simply wired differently to most of us.

I’d argue this is why most organisations treat contrarians not too unlike viruses entering a healthy system. Rather than seeing them as important contributors, they are treated as something to be tamed or simply eliminated. The short sightedness of this should be obvious, but still needs to be voiced. Any culture, any society, and any organisation requires both a quantum of solace and a modicum of contrarianism. Without the former, chaos will reign. Without the latter, conservatism will.

Contrarians aren’t always pleasant, but neither are personal trainers. Both push you to go beyond what is comfortable, which is sometimes painful, as all growth is. You can choose to ignore them but at your peril, as you’ll simply stay as you are.

The contrarian mindset isn’t always easy to wrap your head around. Contrarians are curious characters, particularly as they keep enquiring into assumptions and ideas far beyond most. Where few are comfortable to keep asking questions, contrarians have just started. Their questioning is not personal, it’s part of who they are, and how they have come to experience the world. Contrarians are also courageous: they’ve forged a comfort with the discomfort of being seen as difficult, and still keep on pushing for – or outright fighting for – what they believe is right. This is because contrarians have something that many corporates and creatives lack, namely conviction. Although this will not always endear them to their peers, managers and bosses, they are valuable precisely because they won’t negotiate over the things they truly believe in. Lastly, contrarians have character, a kind of factor X that is difficult to theorise. Corporates will bend, creatives will find new forms of expression, but contrarians rarely slot into frameworks they don’t buy into.

As things stand, you are likely to have contrarians on the payroll already, yet you are getting little to no value added from them at the moment. Organisations are notoriously bad at harnessing the potential of contrarian thinking and often view it as disruptive and unhelpful. The first step to unlocking the potential of contrarian thinking is to create an organisational culture where risk-taking and diversity of thought is not only encouraged but rewarded. Leaders need to both formally and informally acknowledge the value of contrarians and reward them for their ideas. Furthermore, leaders should actively seek out contrarians’ perspectives on important decisions and be prepared to make time to understand and analyse the differences between the majority opinion and the minority view.

One of the companies I work with on all things innovation-related is a major, publicly listed Nordic corporation in real estate. Their CEO is a humble and open person, who has often stated that he is rarely challenged by the people that work there – which includes a decent number of smart creatives. He cherishes the times when his company takes in students and interns for summer jobs. In fact, he makes a point of having lunch with them, so he can listen to their ideas. During one such lunch, an intern stated that they didn’t get why there wasn’t an easy-to-use online portal for the company’s rentals. After hearing this, the CEO went to his executive team to find an answer. He was told that it had never been requested, and was far too complex to build easily. Out of curiosity, the CEO created a stealth team with the summer intern and some technicians from IT just to see what was possible. They got given just a few weeks to create a proof of concept, and what do you know, they’d already got a fully functional prototype site up, as well as atsunami of interested sign-ups.

How contrarians help creatives

Some will still assume that creatives are, by their very nature, contrarians. This is an understandable, yet quite critically flawed assumption. Creatives tend to work from a pattern, a school, a design language. They are excellent at giving ideas shine, spin, and style, but their core skill is very, very rarely to challenge, but to beautify.

True contrarians are the key agents in making creatives challenge their current worldview. They’re the kinds of thinkers who will not accept any of the ideas that your ad agency thought were “ground-breaking”, as true and given.

Instead, I see a contrarian as a kind of creativity coach who helps creatives to break with their frameworks. In his work with the alternative rock’n’roll magazine , Ray Gun, graphic designer David Carson broke all rules of typography when trying to make an incredibly boring interview with Bryan Ferry more engaging (and to make a point about celebrity full stop). He set the whole interview in the font Zapf Dingbats (a set of graphic symbols that have no way of being connected to letters of the alphabet or even interpreted with any consistency). Why? Because he wanted to experiment and see what it would be like to break a traditional framework. The artist Tracey Emin’s “My Bed” could not be more contrarian, whilst at the same time being as objective as objective can be. Sometimes, what scares us most is facing reality.

In an organisation with lots of creatives but few contrarians, you’ll see creative work, but it will increasingly hew towards what’s safe and already known. Over time, it will stagnate into a known language, crystallised forms, with little to give it energy or new form. With a few contrarians in the mix, creatives are empowered to experiment more and test things, and less wedded to design systems, 

"There is a great likelihood that right now, there are contrarians in your organisation who are ready to challenge your strategy, your business model, your ways of doing business."

and making things beautiful. The character of contrarians rubs off, as does their courage. For creatives this is a boon, if at times a challenging one.

How contrarians help corporates

Whilst the relationship between creatives and contrarians might be an understandable one – creatives have a touch of contrarians in them, after all – the collaboration between corporates and contrarians can be more fraught. At the same time, corporates need contrarians even more than creatives do.

Contrarians aid corporates by suggesting new avenues for thought, but challenging existing assumptions, and, maybe most importantly of all, by pushing for new forms of strategic thinking. Consider the case of an ecosystems run business. The old corporate logic was never to allow anyone to potentially benefit from the relationships you had paid dearly to establish. Then Apple and Amazon changed the game, with the contrarian logic of allowing others to benefit from a captured audience – for a price.

There is a great likelihood that right now, there are contrarians in your organisation who are ready to challenge your strategy, your business model, your ways of doing business. It is also very likely that they haven’t gotten the attention and the airtime they require, simply because the narrative works against them.

When Ray Kroc suggested that a fast-food chain’s major value might lie in the real estate it held and/or controlled, few people agreed with him. He persisted and built McDonald’s into a behemoth. When we think about milk, we think about something traditional and staid, but not if you’re Oatley, the Swedish company. Granted they have not always been as contrarian in their marketing, but today they have gone full on contrarian and made anti-brand campaigns their thing. In Copenhagen, they’ve covered most transport hubs with a campaign that calls their own marketing “spam”, and actively encourages people not to sign up to their newsletter. As for their website, it deliberately breaks almost every best digital practice that you’ll find. The result? A huge increase in brand awareness and levels of engagement that would be hard to measure fully. Courageous character matters.

Contrarians tend not to be great builders. Instead, they are great challengers of the status quo, the kind of people who wonder if a taxi company actually needs to own cars (Uber). Left to their own devices, contrarians can steer even the greatest company into the wall – lest we forget what happened to WeWork. – so we must be aware that the art of corporate collaboration with contrarians lies in recognising the power of alternate ways of seeing things, whilst not letting them completely run wild. Once again, the power of both/and thinking is important for contemporary strategy so it balances corporate logic and contrarian craziness.

Building a better mix

I imagine your organisation already has all the corporates it needs. To complement these, you want a hefty number of creatives to bring an aura of newness and forward thinking to your current offerings. The critical aspect will be the way you either embrace or shut out contrarians. If you hire for “cultural fit”, you may be doing damage to your company without even realising it. And, if you ostracise those who do not live up to an arbitrary standard of “cultural fit”, you may well be denying your company one of its most important developmental inputs.If you hire just to keep the culture “as is”, you are denying your organisation what it needs to grow.

On their own, contrarians will never end up creating all that much. They are too difficult, too confrontational, and not inclined to enjoy the slow, long slog of producing things. They are, in their way, like salt. No one would enjoy a meal which is mostly made of salt. That said, few of us would enjoy a meal without salt either, and far too often one comes across food with too little salt than slightly too much. Contrarians are like the salt of your organisation. They bring out the best in the creatives, and they push the corporates out of their comfort zone.

So should you hire contrarians? Yes, yes you should. Not because of their contrarian attitude, but due to the ways they can help your organisation be all it can be. You need your corporates, for their organised, structured way of working you need to be functional. You also need your creatives to make you look good, sound great, and grow your brand awareness.

None the less, you also need contrarians, and you need to know how to take care of them.

There will be contrarians in your organisation already, unless they’ve been cowed into silence or drained by endless attempts to tame and change them.

You need to understand your employee mix – who is a corporate, who is a creative, and who just might be a contrarian. Having solid, hard workers should never be underestimated, nor should creatives. Yet the ideal mix for organisations wanting to innovate and grow is to make sure that you have enough contrarians, so everyone shines and can be who they are by nature.