The Creative Contrarian

Wise Fool Strategy # 2Flex Your Risk Muscle

“If the Creator had a purpose in equipping us with a neck, He surely meant for us to stick it out.”

— Arthur Koestler, Hungarian/British Writer

The nail that sticks up will be hammered down.

— Japanese Proverb

It takes courage to buck the crowd. If you're overly concerned with other people's opinions, you'll have difficulty expressing unusual viewpoints or making the offbeat remarks that fuel further discussion. Wise Fools believe that everyone has a “risk muscle.” One way to keep it in shape is by speaking candid truths. It is by flexing their risk muscles that Wise Fools perform their chief role as “conformity busters” in groupthink situations. Their contrary ideas can lead to more creative solutions. Let's take a closer look.

The classic study of conformity was done by psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s. Asch's objective was to determine how easily a test subject would alter his judgment to conform with a group. Here is the setup. A subject was told he was taking a “vision test” and asked to match lines on two different cards. The first card had a single vertical line on it, and the second had three vertical lines, one of which was the same length as the line on the first card and the other two lines were noticeably either longer or shorter.

Here's the experiment's intriguing part: the subject sat at a table with five ...