The Misunderstood Maverick

The disposition that generates breakthroughs is real, temperamental, and genuinely valuable. It also has a cost — to the person and the people around them. The answer isn't to fix it or worship it. It's to hold it well.

There's a particular kind of person most organizations have a complicated relationship with. They question things everyone else has accepted. They're bored by the settled answer and drawn to the unproven one. They're often right in ways that are obvious only in hindsight, and difficult in ways that are obvious immediately. We call them mavericks, and we tell two contradictory stories about them: the hero who drags everyone into the future, and the problem who won't get in line.

Both stories miss what's actually going on. The maverick disposition is real — it has a measurable basis, a genuine and specific value, and a genuine and specific cost. Understanding all three is what separates using this kind of person well from either romanticizing them or grinding them down. And if you're a founder, this isn't a piece about someone on your team. It's very likely a piece about you.

The disposition is real, not an attitude

The tendency to question, explore, and resist the conventional isn't a pose or a phase. It tracks a well-established personality trait: openness to experience, one of the Big Five, and among the most heritable of them. People high in openness are drawn to novelty and complexity, tolerate ambiguity better than most, and think divergently — generating many possible associations and solutions where others see one settled path. The trait is consistently and strongly linked to creativity and to divergent thinking specifically, the capacity to produce a wide range of ideas rather than converge quickly on the familiar one (McCrae & Costa; DeYoung).

This matters because it reframes the "difficult" part. A high-openness person isn't being contrarian to be annoying. Their mind genuinely works by questioning premises and reaching for the unusual connection — it's how they're built, not a behavior they've chosen to inflict on a meeting. You're not looking at a discipline problem. You're looking at a temperament, with everything that comes with it in both directions.

What it's actually for: widening, not deciding

Here's where precision matters, because the popular story overclaims. The maverick's real value is concentrated at a specific point in the process: the front end, where the question is what are the possibilities?

This is the divergent phase — generating options, challenging the assumption everyone took for granted, noticing the path the consensus skipped. A high-openness mind is genuinely better at this, and its presence pulls the whole group's thinking wider. The research on dissent shows why this compounds: exposure to a genuine challenge to the consensus makes everyone around it search harder and consider more alternatives, even when the challenger turns out to be wrong (Nemeth, 1986). The maverick's contribution isn't only their own ideas — it's that they force better thinking in everyone else.

But — and this is the part the hero story drops — widening the options is not the same as making the decision. Generating ten unconventional possibilities is the maverick's gift; determining which one is right requires a different mode entirely, often a different temperament, and always a real process. The organizations that use mavericks well pair them with something: the disagreement generates the range, and a deliberate decision process closes it. The maverick is essential and insufficient, which is not an insult — it's true of every specialist.

What it costs — to them and around them

The same disposition that generates the breakthrough carries a real cost, and pretending otherwise is how both the person and the organization get hurt.

Around them, the cost is friction. The person who questions everything is exhausting to sit across from when you just want to ship the thing. The one drawn to the unproven idea can destabilize a team that needs some stability to function. Openness untempered by the other traits — the follow-through, the attention to the people in the room — can read as disregard, and sometimes is. This is real, and it doesn't get solved by calling it "just how innovators are."

For the person themselves, the cost is quieter and heavier. A mind built for novelty and questioning is often a poor fit for environments built for consistency and consensus — which is most environments. So the high-openness person spends a lot of their life being told they're too much: too intense, too restless, too contrarian, too fast to abandon what's working. Many have internalized it. Founders especially carry this — the disposition that let them see the thing no one else saw is the same one that made them hard to employ, hard to manage, and frequently misunderstood by people trying, with real goodwill, to make them more normal.

That's the piece the two popular stories both miss. The maverick isn't a hero who transcends the rules or a problem who won't follow them. They're a specific temperament with a specific gift and a specific difficulty, usually operating in conditions built for the opposite temperament.

Holding it, rather than fixing it

The instinct toward a difficult high-performer runs in one of two wrong directions: fix them (sand off the edges until the gift goes with them) or exempt them (tolerate any behavior in the name of genius). Both fail. The third option is the one that actually works, and it's a form of containment.

To contain, in the clinical sense, is to hold something intense steadily enough that it becomes usable rather than destructive — not suppressing it, not being flooded by it, but absorbing it and turning it into something the person and the system can work with (Bion, 1962). For a maverick, that means a few specific things.

Give the disposition a channel, not a cage. The questioning and divergent thinking are the value; the job is to point them where they're generative — the hard problem, the strategic reset, the assumption that needs breaking — rather than at the things that simply need to run. A maverick aimed at a settled operational process will break it for sport; aimed at a genuine problem, they'll find what everyone missed.

Pair, don't isolate. The maverick's insufficiency at the convergent, executional, people-steadying end isn't a deficiency to nag them about — it's a gap to staff around. The most productive maverick usually has someone beside them who closes what they open.

And — if the maverick is you — extend yourself the same holding. The disposition that made you hard to employ is the one that let you build something. It doesn't need to be fixed. It needs to be aimed, paired, and understood — including by you, and including by anyone you bring in to help you think.

The reframe

Mavericks are neither the heroes who save stagnant organizations nor the problems who disrupt healthy ones. They're a real temperament — high openness, divergent thinking, low tolerance for the settled answer — that is genuinely valuable at the front end of any hard problem and genuinely costly if it's isolated, worshipped, or filed down.

Used well, the disposition widens what an organization can see. Held well, it stops costing the person and the people around them more than it gives. That's the actual work with this kind of mind — including, and maybe especially, when the mind is your own. It's also, not incidentally, why people built this way so often go looking for a place that understands both halves of them, rather than one more environment trying to make them ordinary.

References

Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from experience. Heinemann.

DeYoung, C. G., Quilty, L. C., & Peterson, J. B. (2007). Between facets and domains: Ten aspects of the Big Five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 880–896.

Nemeth, C. J. (1986). Differential contributions of majority and minority influence. Psychological Review, 93(1), 23–32.