What uncommon trait does Bill Gates, Steve Jobs & Elon Musk have in common that attributes to their success?  Researchers call it Integrative Complexity.  Ostensibly, they have what conventional wisdom might say are opposing attributes.  For example, they are simultaneously creative and organized, assertive and open-minded, confident, yet humble.

One author described it as "the ability to develop and hold opposing traits, values, and ideas and integrate them into larger ones."

Opposing Attributes

In a breakthrough study, Ray Dalio (author of Principles) revealed the following:

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.

They also tend to do things that you assume people don’t do together. Let me give you an example... Ordinarily, you’ll have a creative who you say, “Oh, they’re very, very creative but they don’t like structured.” Or a very structured person doesn’t like creativity…

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, “Wow. They sound so brilliant and they’re asking the questions.” But if you’re in discussions with them, and I’m sure that you [Tony Robbins] have been in discussion with them, what you find out is generally speaking that they’re curious, voraciously curious. They’re wondering if they’re wrong. They’re taking in information. So they don’t look as confident when you’re in those conversations.

Complexity

In a second breakthrough study (1996) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of Flow) examined a diverse group of creative geniuses.

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 — instead of being an ‘individual,’ each of them is a ‘multitude’…

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 ‘good,’ whereas the other extreme is ‘bad’…

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.

Constructive Tension

In a third study Roger Martin, who was named the world’s leading business thinker in 2017 conducted extensive interviews with more than 50 of the world's top business leaders - like Michael Dell, A.G. Lafley, and Jack Welch.  He observed: “what made them successful was not making trade-offs … just refusing, and then saying, ‘There’s got to be a better way.’”

Martain describes Integregative Complexity as The Opposable Mind 

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.