You Need More Misfits in Your Life

So a politician and a novelist walk out of the governor’s office.

“Will you remember my name?” the politician asks as they say goodbye.

“Probably not,” says the novelist.

“That’s ok,” says the politician. “I have a feeling that this will be the start of a great partnership.”

Decades after a meeting very much like this actually took place, most of us have forgotten – or never even knew – the names of the politician, Terry Sanford, or the novelist, John Ehle. But what they accomplished together is a story we need to remember and learn from, especially as the twin crises of the coronavirus pandemic and the struggle for racial justice urgently demand a new levels of leadership and creativity.

There was a time when a lot of people knew who Sanford was – a decorated World War II paratrooper, progressive governor of North Carolina, Duke University president, U.S. presidential candidate, and U.S. Senator. In fact, a Harvard study named Sanford, who died in 1998, one of the ten greatest American governors of the 20^th century.

Many qualities made Sanford exceptional, the kind of leader who succeeded in elevating Research Triangle Park to world-class standing, advocating for civil rights, and making North Carolina a pioneer in K-12 and higher education. There are two Sanford traits, though, that remain especially relevant today.

First, he gave creative thinking its due.

Second, he knew how to nurture it: by shaking up organizational cultures and personal routines before they grow stale.

Dan Buchner, an international authority on design thinking, works with major corporate and government clients around the world on sparking innovation. He reports that they often overlook or are unwilling to accept a fundamental tenet – that innovation really starts with organizations welcoming misfits and oddballs who don’t think the way everyone else does.

When companies get too focused on hiring talent that won’t rock the boat, the descent toward irrelevance has already begun. The same might be said about ourselves. Once we’re too settled on own approaches and unwilling to consider new ones, especially those that make us uncomfortable, we’re already putting our performance and well-being at risk.

That’s why Sanford, shortly after being elected as North Carolina’s governor in the early 1960s, invited John Ehle to his office.

It was an unlikely pairing. Ehle, a distinguished novelist and UNC-Chapel Hill professor, knew so little about politics that he misspelled Sanford’s name in his journal after their first meeting. Working in government didn’t appeal to Ehle, who repeatedly turned down personal pleas from Sanford to join his team.

For Sanford, however, this union was completely logical. “He looked for people who had ideas, and he was comfortable with a lot of ideas floating around at the same time,” says Howard Covington Jr., co-author of the biography Terry Sanford: Politics, Progress and Outrageous Ambitions.

As Covington recounts, Sanford had read a newspaper piece by Ehle about the decline of the arts at UNC-Chapel Hill, Sanford’s alma mater, and what could be done to turn it around. He saw Ehle as precisely the kind of creative type whom governors typically never made room for on their staffs – and whose innovative thinking could energize his entire administration. Sanford didn’t relent until the writer had signed on as a special assistant, cobbling together a private grant to pay his salary.

In a few short years, Ehle’s ideas helped transform North Carolina’s business and arts landscape in lasting ways. In an unusual move at that time, Ehle chased down national foundation dollars to form the North Carolina Fund, a nonprofit that fought poverty across the state through education, job training and community development programs. The initiative, a model for Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, was, according to Covington’s book, “creative, even revolutionary, and produced self-sustaining programs that remained a generation later.”

Ehle played key roles in founding the N.C. School of the Arts and the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics, helping launch a national trend in education for gifted students. He also proposed the commission that launched the state’s film industry.

It was a pattern that Sanford repeated for the rest of his career: surround himself with people who thought differently than he did, make time to listen to their ideas and line up the resources to follow through when their suggestions seemed worth the gamble. It all sounds pretty straightforward. And yet, too many leaders and organizations – and far too many of us in our personal lives as well – do exactly the opposite, preferring the security of familiar notions, little ambiguity and minimal risk.

If we’re serious about tapping fully into our own potential and that of the organizations and communities we belong to, we should be asking ourselves: are we searching hard enough for our own John Ehles? And when we find them, will we be open-minded enough to listen?