Studies Show That People Who Have High âIntegrative Complexityâ Are More Likely To Be Successful
A self-made billionaire studied Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk. An eminent researcher interviewed Nobel Laureates. They each came to the same conclusion.
Authorâs Note: This article was written over 60 hours with love and care using the blockbuster mental model.
My 6â5â dad was black and grew up in one of the most dangerous cities in America. He sported a huge afro into the early â90s, when he died at the age of 35 from lung cancer, one year younger than I am now.
My mother, a Jewish refugee from Poland, arrived in Brooklyn when she was 17 with no money and no English. She was essentially a single mother for most of my childhood.
That makes me a half-black, half-white, 6â5â man born into a half-Christian, half-Jewish family, and raised by a refugee.
So I watch the daily culture wars unfold with mixed feelings. Recently, I listened to a podcast about race in which my people were described as âthe victims.â Then I listened to another podcast, and this one cast me on the side of âthe oppressor.â The result is that I tend to feel like a chameleon and see both sides of many of the issues currently being debated. I used to feel like I should pretend to strongly take one side or the other. But as Iâve gotten older, Iâve come to embrace this ability to appreciate contrasting viewpoints without labeling one right and the other wrong.
And then I found four studies, independently conducted by four of the greatest thinkers of our time, that basically came to the same surprising conclusion: Many of the worldâs top entrepreneursâlike Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Elon Muskâalong with Nobel Laureates have a common, rare skill called âintegrative complexity.â Integrative complexity is the ability to develop and hold opposing traits, values, and ideas and then integrate them into larger ones.
These findings go against conventional wisdom in the business world, which is that we should double down on our strengths and mitigate everything else. They are also opposed to conventional tribal wisdom that says we should pick one side of every polarity and vehemently fight for it.
Here are the five breakthrough studies on why integrative complexity is a key to success, personal growth, and cultural polarization.
Breakthrough Study 1: Self-Made Billionaire Entrepreneur Studies And Interviews Some Of The Best Entrepreneurs Ever
In the first study, self-made billionaire Ray Dalio (author of Principles) conducted long interviews with and performed comprehensive personality assessments on Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Reed Hastings (founder of Netflix), Muhammad Yunus (social entrepreneur and Nobel Peace Prize recipient), Jack Dorsey (Twitter co-founder and CEO), and other luminaries. To my knowledge, no other study has gone so in-depth with so many high-level, busy leaders.
After collecting the data, Dalio narrowed his findings into a list of seven common traits. Of those traits, Dalio said that the most interesting was this:
All are able to see both big pictures and granular details (and levels in between) and synthesize the perspectives they gain at those different levels, whereas most people see just one or the other. They are simultaneously creative, systematic, and practical. They are assertive and open-minded at the same time.
In an interview with Tony Robbins, Dalio further unpacks his observation:
They also tend to do things that you assume people donât do together. Let me give you an example... Ordinarily, youâll have a creative who you say, âOh, theyâre very, very creative but they donât like structured.â Or a very structured person doesnât like creativityâŠ
The best ones are people who not only have good mental maps of how things should be done, but they have high levels of humility. [In other words, they are smart and humble.] It may not look that way to an outsider. You may look at some of these people and you might say, âWow. They sound so brilliant and theyâre asking the questions.â But if youâre in discussions with them, and Iâm sure that you [Tony Robbins] have been in discussion with them, what you find out is generally speaking that theyâre curious, voraciously curious. Theyâre wondering if theyâre wrong. Theyâre taking in information. So they donât look as confident when youâre in those conversations.
Breakthrough Study 2: Eminent Psychologist Studies Creative Geniuses
The second study was completed in 1996 by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of Flow), after performing in-depth interviews with a diverse group of 91 creative geniuses, from Nobel Laureates to business tycoons to renowned artists. When describing what these individuals had in common, he wrote this (itâs a long passage, but worth it):
If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it would be complexity. By this I mean that they show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes â instead of being an âindividual,â each of them is a âmultitudeââŠ
These qualities are present in all of us, but usually we are trained to develop only one pole of the dialectic. We might grow up cultivating the aggressive, competitive side. A creative individual is more likely to be both aggressive and cooperative, either at the same time or at different times, depending on the situation. Having a complex personality means being able to express the full range of traits that are potentially present in the human repertoire but usually atrophy because we think that one or the other pole is âgood,â whereas the other extreme is âbadââŠ
A complex personality does not imply neutrality, or the average. It is not some position at the midpoint between two poles. It does not imply, for instance, being wishy-washy, so that one is never very competitive or very cooperative. Rather it involves the ability to move from one extreme to the other as the occasion requires.
Breakthrough Study 3: Leading Business Thinker Studies Business Icons
The third study was conducted by Roger Martin, who was named the worldâs leading business thinker in 2017. Martin conducted in-depth interviews (some over eight hours long) with over 50 of the worldâs top business leadersâsuch as Michael Dell, former Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley, and Jack Welchâand put his findings into several books. His conclusion echoes Csikszentmihalyi and Dalio:
What made them successful was not making trade-offs ⊠just refusing, and then saying, âThereâs got to be a better way.â
Martin calls this approach âintegrative thinking,â and defines it in his book The Opposable Mind as:
The ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each.
Breakthrough Study 4: Adult Development Pioneer Surveys Tens Of Thousands
Finally, we have the lifetime work of Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan and his peers in the field of adult development. To put their work in context, you should know that in the 1930s, psychologist Jean Piaget identified four universal stages of cognitive development in humans:
Piagetâs work suggested that adolescents reached a final stage, which they remained in throughout adulthood.
This understanding was later turned on its head by the adult development field, where longitudinal studies showed that similar to children, adults go through a series of universal and predictable phases as shown in the model below created by Robert KeganâŠ
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9d070856-47b8-4931-8898-3310259cfaf4_421x312.png)
The final stage of Keganâs model, which only one percent of the population reaches, is called the Self-Transforming Mind. Whatâs fascinating about this stage is that one develops the ability to hold conflicting, contradictory, and paradoxical ideologies, thoughts, and values simultaneously. At this stage, weâre no longer a prisoner of one identity. Instead, we can fluidly explore the subtleties and complexities of multiple ways of experiencing reality. For a more complex overview, I recommend this 20-minute video of Kegan explaining his findings.
Breakthrough Study 5: Good To Great Author And Researcher Jim Collins Says Great Leaders Follow The âGenius of the ANDâ
Collins explainsâŠ
Instead of being oppressed by the âTyranny of the OR,â highly visionary companies liberate themselves with the âGenius of the ANDââthe ability to embrace both extremes of a number of dimensions at the same time. Instead of choosing between A OR B, they figure out a way to have both A AND B.
Weâre not talking about mere balance here. âBalanceâ implies going to the midpoint, fifty-fifty, half and half. A visionary company doesnât seek balance between short-term and long-term, for example. It seeks to do very well in the short-term and very well in the long-term. A visionary company doesnât simply balance between idealism and profitability; it seeks to be highly idealistic and highly profitable. A visionary company doesnât simply balance between preserving a tightly held core ideology and stimulating vigorous change and movement; it does both to an extreme. In short, a highly visionary company doesnât want to blend yin and yang into a gray, indistinguishable circle that is neither highly yin nor highly yang; it aims to be distinctly yin and distinctly yangâboth at the same time, all the time.
Irrational? Perhaps. Rare? Yes. Difficult? Absolutely. But as F. Scott Fitzgerald pointed out, âThe test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.â This is exactly what the visionary companies are able to do.
Upon learning about âintegrative complexity,â I started noticing the quality in the iconic entrepreneurs Iâve been writing about over the past few yearsâentrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Ray Dalio, Steve Jobs.
Jeff Bezos is a master at balancing short-term and long-term. To this end, one of his favorite quotes is the Latin saying Gradatim Ferociter, which means âstep-by-step ferociously.â At the same time, heâs financing the development of a 10,000-year clock on one of his properties to symbolize the value of long-term thinking.
Elon Musk balances incredible vision with exquisite attention to detail. On the one hand, he is known for visions decades in the future that include humanity becoming multi-planetary, getting off of fossil fuels, and avoiding an artificial general intelligence apocalypse. At the same time, he literally taught himself how to be a designer, rocket scientist, and car engineer. When Musk showed Ray Dalio his own car for the first time, Dalio says, âhe had as much to say about the key fob that opened the doors as he did about his overarching vision.â
And, of course, Steve Jobs was a detail-oriented visionary. He is famous for insisting that the inside of a Mac should be as well designed as the outsideâeven though no one would ever see it. We learn in Jobsâ biography that as he lay in his bed dying from cancer, he asked for five different oxygen masks so that he could choose the one with the best design.
If the conclusions of these studies are true, they have major implications for business, education, parenting, and personal development. They force us to rethink some of our most fundamental beliefs around how we can develop our potential.
Implication 1: Move Beyond The Strengths-Based Paradigm Of Skill Development.
The current trend in management thinking is to focus almost solely on our strengths and mitigate our weaknesses by hiring other people. If you have a blind spot or are resisting learning something, thatâs fine. Just get someone else to do it.
These studies imply that we may want to instead focus on developing and synthesizing atypical combinations of skills and traits with their opposites in order to develop an emergent skill set that is both rare and extremely valuable.
In other words, the focus would not just be on strengths, but instead on multiplier skill sets where 1+1=10. For more on the power of combining atypical combinations, read my article People Who Have âToo Many Interestsâ Are More Likely To Be Successful According To Research.
The most eloquent explanation that Iâve ever seen on multiplier skill sets comes from one of the top venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in the world, Marc Andreessen:
The world is becoming an ever more complicated place. Everything is slamming together. Fields that used to be discreet are now combining, due in a large part to what weâve been talking about. And so itâs not about any individual skill, itâs about combining skills, and then constantly layering in new skills.
Andreessen goes on to give an example of an engineer who is also a writer, and who then becomes knowledgeable in education. Each of these skills is common, but as you combine them you end up with more and more rare skill sets:
When you think about it, the power of atypical combinations is really remarkable. Itâs like creating real gold from foolâs gold. Itâs the ultimate act of alchemy.
Implication 2: Think About What To Learn Next In A Fundamentally Different Way.
Weâre moving from a one-skill model to a multi-skill model. At a minimum, every few years, weâre going to need a new skill.
And in this rapidly changing knowledge economy, one of the most important and difficult decisions we have to make repeatedly is what to learn next. Do we take that course on data science and machine learning or sign up for a design class? Do we study mental models or receive coaching on how to build relationships? Do we learn the thing that will pay off right away or focus on the long-term goal?
These studies suggest a surprising approach: Learn the polar opposite of a skill or trait you already have. If youâre great at numbers, develop your language skills. If youâre a whiz at keeping track of details, learn how to see the big picture. If you love business, delve into something creative. If you love art, learn about business.