For a long time, I have returned to a question that has become harder to answer with every team and organization I have experienced: what makes a group exceptionally good—or exceptionally bad?
I have worked with many capable people, helped build businesses, and watched teams form, grow, reorganize, and disappear. Yet I have experienced that special, almost magical team feeling only once.
I mean the feeling that the group makes everybody in it better. The work is demanding and discussions can be intense, but you learn because somebody sees what you cannot see. You attempt things you might not have attempted alone. Differences in background and personality become useful rather than exhausting.
That experience happened more than twenty years ago, inside a large corporation responding to deregulation. The company established a new wholesale unit, recruiting many people externally. We came from different industries and parts of Switzerland, represented different generations, and brought very different professional experiences into the same group.
We had little shared history. What we shared was a challenge that none of us could address entirely alone.
Recently, I contacted former colleagues to ask what they remembered. One replied, loosely translated:
People from different industries came together and pursued one common goal. Different age groups, many different and quite special characters from across Switzerland. We learned openly from each other. And because you were there. 😁
I will treat the final point as friendly nostalgia rather than scientific evidence. What interested me was what remained after twenty years: difference, a common goal, and learning together.
Reading Colin M. Fisher’s The Collective Edge gave me a way to reconsider that experience. Perhaps what I remembered as magic was a reinforcing process we had never named.
Perhaps the magic was a feedback loop
Fisher describes groups as dynamic systems. Good work design, meaningful goals, coordination, effort, and performance can reinforce one another. When membership becomes valuable, people invest more, learn together, and develop capabilities that strengthen the group further. The reverse cycle can also occur: weak structures and disappointing work reduce participation, capable people leave, and the group loses some of its ability to improve [1].
That interpretation fits my experience, although our memories cannot establish what caused the team’s success.
My capabilities grew because I worked with people who knew things I did not know. I encountered unfamiliar industries, ways of negotiating, sales approaches, and interpretations of customer behavior. Over time, I could make judgments that would previously have required somebody else’s help. I also became better at recognizing when I still needed that help.
The work developed us while we were doing it.
A great team compounds human capability.
That is the proposition I now find more useful than discussions about an ideal team composition. Alongside what a team delivers, we should examine what happens to people while they belong to it. Does their judgment improve? Does their expertise become more accessible to colleagues? Can they tackle problems they would have struggled with alone?
Difference has to become useful
My former colleague remembered our different backgrounds. It would be tempting to conclude that diversity explained our performance, but that would skip the important part: what we did with those differences.
Van Knippenberg, De Dreu, and Homan developed their categorization-elaboration model to explain why research on diversity and performance had produced inconsistent findings. Different backgrounds can introduce relevant information and perspectives, but the benefits depend on whether the group examines and integrates them. Social divisions can prevent that information from becoming useful [2].
In our team, the changing market gave our different experiences a common purpose. Shared learning helped us develop enough common language to work together without requiring everybody to think alike.
We also gradually learned whose judgment to seek. A difficult negotiation, an unfamiliar customer situation, or a legal question did not require everyone to become an expert. It required knowing where relevant expertise existed and involving it at the right moment.
Research calls this a transactive memory system: the group’s understanding of who knows what and how to coordinate that knowledge. A meta-analysis by Bachrach and colleagues links these systems with team performance, while emphasizing the context in which they develop [5].
This is one reason I am skeptical of innovation-team recipes such as “hacker, hipster, hustler.” They remind us that complementary capabilities matter, but they can make team design look like a staffing puzzle. Filling the roles leaves a substantial question unanswered: can these people actually use one another’s knowledge?
A team can possess the required expertise and still make it difficult to access.
We noticed more than the work
Another quality became clearer as I reflected on the old team: people noticed what was happening to one another.
Sometimes the situation was straightforward. Someone struggled with a customer, encountered a legal complication, or faced a problem outside their experience. A colleague stepped in or connected them with someone who could help.
At other times, someone was going through a difficult period or behaving differently from usual. Another person noticed and approached them. Support could begin with a conversation rather than waiting for the difficulty to become a formal performance issue.
Looking back, I think that attentiveness contributed to how we worked together. We understood something about who knew what, but also about who might need help.
Woolley and colleagues’ research offers a relevant connection. In their group experiments, collective performance was associated with members’ average social sensitivity and more equal conversational participation [3]. Those findings do not retrospectively explain our team, but they provide a reason to look beyond individual intelligence when examining group capability.
For innovation work, the practical issue is whether relevant information receives attention. A colleague hesitates over an assumption. A salesperson hears a recurring objection. A developer raises a concern that does not yet fit the roadmap. Someone who usually contributes becomes quiet.
None of these signals has a single interpretation. Attentiveness means noticing and investigating, rather than assuming we already understand.
I would not claim that interpersonal sensitivity automatically produces better market sensing. But I would ask how effectively a team can investigate weak customer signals if it routinely overlooks the concerns of people sitting in its own meetings.
A system can lose access to talent before people leave
I have experienced the reverse dynamic too. The contrast mattered precisely because one of my best team experiences had occurred inside a large corporation.
In other environments, I experienced expectations becoming more ambitious while the strategy connecting them to reality became less clear. Work accumulated, but a growing share seemed disconnected from meaningful progress. Reporting and coordination consumed more attention, while the opportunity to use or develop expertise became harder to find.
You could invest your own time and money in education, return with new knowledge, and discover that little changed in the work you were trusted to perform or the decisions you could influence. Development was encouraged, but its practical use remained limited.
I watched capable people become more selective about their contribution. My interpretation was that some were protecting their energy after repeated efforts produced little influence, learning, or recognition. They continued doing their jobs while becoming less willing to invest everything they could offer.
That interpretation will not explain every instance of reduced participation. Workload, personal circumstances, unclear responsibilities, or a change in the task may also matter. But automatically treating the outcome as an individual engagement problem excludes the system from examination.
An organization can retain talented people while losing access to much of their talent.
This is where psychological safety becomes relevant. Edmondson’s research connects a shared sense of safety for interpersonal risk-taking with learning behaviors such as asking for help, seeking feedback, and discussing errors [6].
Innovation requires those behaviors because important information can threaten an attractive plan. Someone needs to explain that the customer problem may be less important than expected, that the technical approach has limitations, or that the pilot results do not justify the proposed investment.
The question is whether that information can be examined without turning the discussion into a test of the messenger’s loyalty or competence.
Interested in working together?
When reasonable responses reinforce decline
The difficult part is that organizational decline can emerge from individually understandable responses.
People encounter work they cannot influence and become more protective of their effort. Managers see weaker results and request more reporting. Reporting leaves less time for investigation, customer contact, and development. Experienced people depart or narrow their contribution, increasing the coordination burden on those who remain.
This is a possible reinforcing cycle, not an explanation to impose on every struggling organization. Its value is that it directs attention to relationships between conditions that might otherwise be treated separately.
An engagement problem, a reporting problem, and a retention problem may be connected. Addressing each independently can leave the process producing them intact.
That is why I would evaluate organizations in both directions. We already ask what people contribute to the organization. We should also ask what participation in the organization is doing to them.
Are they developing better judgment? Is their expertise becoming more useful to others? Can they introduce uncomfortable evidence? Or are they primarily becoming better at navigating internal expectations while keeping their more valuable contributions to themselves?
The next uncertainty changes what the team needs
Innovation teams face an additional complication: the work changes what they need to know.
Early questions may concern customer struggles and switching behavior. Technical feasibility, purchasing, delivery economics, and retention can become more consequential as the venture develops. These uncertainties overlap; they do not disappear in a neat sequence.
A team that is excellent at understanding a problem may need additional expertise to establish a viable delivery model. A strong technical team may lack access to the people who control purchasing. The appropriate response could be development, temporary support, partnerships, or a change in responsibilities and membership.
The challenge is to recognize the gap accurately. Is the capability absent, or is existing expertise being overlooked? Would another specialist help, or would that person encounter the same constraints?
Continuity matters because trust, shared knowledge, and coordination take time to develop. Openness matters because an established team can become highly capable at addressing questions that are no longer the most important ones.
The task is to preserve what the group has learned while enabling it to become the team the next uncertainty requires.
What the team makes possible
I no longer think the team I remember was magical, although I still value how unusual the experience felt.
We had different starting points and learned to use them. We noticed when someone needed help or saw something others had missed. The work gave our contributions a purpose, and participating in it expanded what we could understand and do.
I cannot reconstruct every cause after twenty years. But the experience changed the standard against which I assess a team.
Individual talent matters. So do the conditions that allow it to influence the work and develop through other people.
Before asking whether you need better people, examine what your team makes possible for those already there. Which knowledge reaches decisions? Which contributions repeatedly disappear? What are people becoming better at through working together?
Those questions will not reveal a universal recipe. They can reveal whether the next intervention should concern expertise, the way work is organized, or the conditions under which people contribute.
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Is your team missing capability—or making it difficult to contribute?
Before approving another hire, commissioning team training, or reorganizing responsibilities, examine what happens to the expertise already available.
The Collective Capability Review helps you investigate whether your team lacks a relevant capability, struggles to access it, or operates under conditions that make contributing it difficult.
In the lesson below, a worked example shows how similar symptoms can lead to different explanations and interventions. You can then use the review worksheet to examine your own team.
You will leave with a specific capability problem, competing explanations, a bounded change to test, and observable signs that would justify continuing or reconsidering it.
