This excellent Quartz article ‘A Berkeley professor explains why society needs more troublemakers‘ touches a nerve as I consider myself to be sometimes moderately in that category – in a constructive manner.
The interesting part is of course that troublemarkers improve team thinking and avoid “groupthink“: “research in social psychology and cognition has shown that disagreement improves group thinking. “It’s a benefit regardless of whether or not [dissenters] hold the truth,” she argues. “Most people are afraid and they don’t speak up. Companies have that problem all the time. And the research really shows us that that even if it’s wrong, the fact that the majority or the consensus is challenged actually stimulates thinking.”
Of course being a dissenter does not make you popular immediately, as Marshall McLuhan reminds us (“Every Society honours its live conformists and its dead troublemakers“), still it is quite needed, and in particular when tackling complex problems.
