The necessity of deviance

(upbeat music) - Here's a really strange reality. We love mavericks, but in everyday organizational life, well we work pretty hard to shun them and to silence them. You see, it's one of the oldest ironies in organizational life. We need order out of chaos. We need structure so we make rules. We have meetings, we have policies and methodologies and they do help us.

But slowly, they start killing us and make work very, very difficult. Boring, painful and completely irrelevant. So meet the organizational deviant. I mean you can call them what you want. The deviant, the maverick, the change agent. Square peg round hole. They're people who understand the need to try new things, the need to push forward quickly. The need to really not think as much about red tape, but instead, how sometimes we have to work around red tape.

So my advice to you. Now when you're hiring people, you're going to be looking for a large diversity of folks, most of whom will be motivated, educated, awesome, rule followers, but at the same time, I've got to remind you to also look for a few of those awesome deviants willing and able to question why we're doing what we're doing. People who don't revere the status quo quite as much as everyone else. Your job is to protect them and I'll be honest.

It's a pretty serious challenge. As soon as a deviant speaks up and tries to advocate for a position that's not quite popular or moves in a direction that maybe others don't want to go, I can promise you, some people will attack. See, what you want is for them to continue being their normal selves, thinking a little outside the box, being willing to speak up. If you don't, well, here's a promise. A committee full of motivated, well-intentioned rule followers will almost never create game-changing next-level innovation.

You need the deviant. You know, in a healthy organization, let me ask you, for every 100 really awesome talented rule followers, how many deviants do you think you need? I think you need at least two to three. These are people willing to bend the rules in order to help us make progress and if you don't find them, help them and protect them, well they're just going to go help improve someone else's organization.