Don’t «Trust the Team» if They’re Stupid!

Yes, that title is intended to ruffle a few feathers. "Trust the team," without context - is a slogan: unhelpful, misleading, and quite often the cause of, not the solution to, greater problems.
Many people associate "Stupid" with low intellect. If you do: let me change your mind. In business, stupidity is behaviour, not IQ.

This is stupid

Imagine you’re the CEO of a company in crisis. An old friend offers a deal that could get you back on your feet.
The only catch: they need to be convinced their contribution will be valued. You assure them it will.

You arrange for them to meet your team. You can’t be there, but they’re all professionals: they’ve got this.

Then your phone rings. There will be no follow-up. The deal is off. Worse: they’ll no longer offer introductions or recommendations; it would damage their own reputation.

What just happened? Your team's actions just cost you an ally and years of relationship-building. There was no malice or sabotage. It was just plain stupidity.

People do stupid things - even with every safeguard in place. And when it happens, your role shifts instantly: from shaping the future to cleaning up the mess.

Understanding Stupidity

Half a century ago, the economist Carlo Cipolla wrote a satirical, uncomfortable essay titled "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" ("Le leggi fondamentali della stupidità umana", 1976)

He determined the value of actions by two factors: impact on self and impact on others. Stupidity, he said, harms both.

You may ask, "Why would anyone do that?" Which is the point: There is no reason, yet it happens, far more often than we think. And - it's stupid.

The Leader’s Field Guide to Dealing with Stupid Teams

Executive Lens - the "CEO Method"

Stupid teams damage the company and themselves. Deal with them in three steps:

C

ontain - Contain the blast radius and do damage control.

E

ducate - Teach, guide and provide information. Tighten feedback loops.

O

bserve - Actively monitor for change. If there's no improvement, disengage or remove the team.

Below is the full, detailed guide to fixing "Team Stupidity."

Full Guide

Locate your team in the quadrant. Lead accordingly. With the exception of the Intelligent team, move them out of the quadrant.

Helpless Teams Indicators Say “yes” → drown → miss their own deadlines. Apologize to stakeholders for internal confusion they didn’t cause. Work hard, little leverage; impact diffuses into others’ wins. Contain Set a single owner and cap WIP; enforce trade-offs. Give permission & scripts to say “not now” without guilt. Pair with an assertive peer; protect calendar from drive-bys. Educate Boundary & negotiation training. Actively guide prioritization. Teach cost-benefit thinking Observe Check for signs of power slopes. Level the playing field. Create visibility into team outcomes.

Intelligent Teams Indicators Net-positive outcomes for team & stakeholders; few surprises. Double-loop learning: they stress-test their own ideas. Credit-sharing, clear handoffs, clean partner interactions. Grow Protect decision rights; remove bureaucracy and politics. Feed them high-leverage problems at their competence boundary. Use pre-mortems & lightweight decision logs to scale the pattern. Keep this! Don’t move them. Codify playbooks; mentor others; plan succession. Guide them to mentor others as well.

Stupid Teams Indicators Celebrate "wins" that produce more fallout than benefit. Repeat the same error after feedback; high confidence, low grasp. Create more problems than they resolve; eroding external trust. Contain Suspend outward-facing autonomy immediately. Enforce brief → act → debrief with decision logs & pre-mortems. Route external comms over an “adult in the room”; assign a fixer. Educate Provide context Teach about consequences. Coach forward-thinking. Observe Positive change: gradually grow autonomy. No measurable shift: redeploy or remove. Protect the company. Unsuccessful: disengage. Protect your reputation.

Bandits Indicators Local "wins" with systemic damage; stakeholders feel squeezed. Information hoarding, triangulation, credit theft. Success depends on optics, not durable outcomes. Contain Shift metrics to shared outcomes; add sunlight (public cause-effect dashboards). Rotate ownership; enforce conflict-of-interest disclosures. Close feedback loops; limit blast radius. Educate Remove incentives that put personal gain over systemic benefit Tether incentives to peer and stakeholder satisfaction. Redesign structure to face customer outcomes. Observe Aligned outcomes: anchor changes. Misaligned outcomes: modify incentives. Exploitation persists: disengage.

Stupidity is Contagious

Can't you just ignore Stupidity? No!

Uncontrolled stupidity sucks you into its blast radius at the worst moment.

And here’s the real danger: tolerating stupidity makes you stupid. Leadership turns into firefighting. Disastrous trade-offs become "pragmatic." Cut corners become "quick wins."

A single act of stupidity rarely remains alone. It triggers a domino cascade, and before long, you're no longer a leader - but cleaning up the debris.

The Leader’s Job: Damage Control

Stupidity is more dangerous to your organization than banditry. Bandits can be managed: Their moves are predictable, and can be redirected by adjusting incentives.

Stupidity, however, is an entirely different beast. It's chaotic and self-reinforcing. You can't predict what they'll do, when or how, and what it will cause. And worse: Stupidity compounds - a stupid move is often addressed by yet another stupid move.

With a stupid team, every day is risk. Challenge poor logic directly. Immediately intervene when "good intentions" cause damage. Invest in change. And when that fails, cut the ties.

Leadership doesn't mean suffering from stupidity - but to end it.

Trust the Right Teams

"Trust the team" is powerful - when the team has earned it! Trust intelligent teams. Give them space to think, act, and lead.

When you see stupid moves, stop "trusting" - actively fix it, fast and with consequence.

Stupidity has no limits. But the market's patience does.

The Castle Is Under Siege - are you the bard?

“If you focus on people being busy, you get people being busy.”

You’ve probably heard that one in some Agile training or coaching session. It sounds profound. But it’s often used in ways that are… well, wrong.

This kind of slogan gets thrown around as if it’s gospel. It’s Agile Coaching Dogma: stemming from half-understood principles and applying Goodhart’s Law in isolation.

Let’s be clear: it’s nonsense. And it misdirects.

The Castle Under Siege

Imagine a medieval castle under siege.
Enemy troops on horseback are approaching fast.
The guards are scrambling to prepare.

The defenders need bows: Everyone will be dead if the siege succeeds.

But there’s only one fletcher.

He’s already buried in work, literally stringing bows as if his life depends on it. There’s a line of guards waiting, each of them waiting for a bow. He’s clearly under pressure.

Meanwhile, his apprentice is chasing that irritating mouse which gnawed at the bread overnight.

Just at that moment, a bard arrives with a clearly urgent request:: “ My mandolin broke, and I really need you to take a look. It’s for the royal banquet tonight. The king will be very upset if there is no music!”

So what’s the real problem?

The issue here isn’t just who’s busy — it’s how busy they are - and what they’re busy with.

What we're talking about here isn’t micromanaging everyone’s calendar. It’s understanding the Critical Path and applying the Theory of Constraints.

1. You have a bottleneck on your Critical Path to success.

The fletcher is the bottleneck. No bows = no defense. No defense = everyone's dead. Preventing that situation is the mission. Everything else is a means to this end.

2. The performance of the bottleneck defines the outcome.

In any system, the bottleneck limits total performance. Here, it's the speed at which the fletcher produces bows which defines whether the castle stands or falls.

3. When the bottleneck is overburdened, stop everything that doesn’t contribute to the Critical Path.

Seriously - cancel that mandolin repair request. Forget that status report. And that retrospective can wait until the archers are equipped.

4. Everyone else's job is to support the bottleneck.

Even if they're inefficient. Two guards stringing bows badly still gives you more bows than one fletcher collapsed from being overworked.

"But they're not specialists, it's not their job description, they aren't trained ..." - you underestimate human ingenuity. They will learn. They will grow. And even if they can't do all of it, there's most certainly some steps where they can relieve your bottleneck.

5. If others are blocked, and it’s not on the Critical Path?

That’s not the bottleneck’s problem. Trying to make it the fletcher’s problem only increases the risk of failure.

Everyone has their own "highest priority. And that's exactly the problem: not knowing the Critical Path, not understanding the price your request towards the bottleneck has in the Big Picture - that's how you destroy performance and slow everything down!

Does it resonate?

In a cartoon, the issue is obvious. You see the problem.

But in real organizations?

• Workloads are hidden.
• Everything seems critical.
• Risks are opaque.
• Goals are unclear.
• And attention is given by status and urgency, not by impact.

So what happens?

• Managers ask the fletcher to put down the bows and provide a status update.
• Consultants draw the fletcher into working sesstions to map the fletching process.
• Agile Coaches pull the fletcher into a retrospective and point out that skipping the Dailies means he's not embracing Agile.

Meanwhile, the castle is about to be overrun.

The brutal truth

The fletcher doesn’t need your coaching right now. The fletcher doesn’t need an alignment workshop. The fletcher needs help!

If you’re not helping, get out of the way. And then figure out how you can help.

This is Theory of Constraints

• Identify the bottleneck.
• Utilize the bottleneck.
• Protect the bottleneck.
• Support the bottleneck.

Not everyone in your company is the fletcher. But someone is. Do you know who?

And if you’re not helping them?

You just might be the bard.

Predictability in middle management? Good luck!

If you’ve ever worked in middle management, you’ve likely felt stuck between chaos from below and control from above. Executives demand structure, predictability, and process adherence. Teams, on the other hand, thrive on flexibility, adaptation, and autonomy.
And the manager? They’re caught in the middle, playing a never-ending game of Rock-Paper-Scissors.

Management: A Game of Rock-Paper-Scissors

You may wonder: What do management and Rock-Paper-Scissors have in common? Middle management is a shark basin - the other a lighthearted, simple hand game often played by kids. I often thought about how to explain what happens in middle management to people unfamiliar with it - and came up with this game as a simple model of what middle management has to deal with.

The Three Moves

As a middle manager, you can ultimately play only one of three moves:

Rock = Stability

Large companies are noisy, chaotic and unpredictable. Playing "Rock" means standardization, consistency, documentation, governance, and regulatory compliance create some predictability.

On the downside, an overuse of Rock makes the process itself the goal, and that causes tremendous waste.

Paper = Delivery

Paper is about taking action, getting stuff done, and produces measurable outcomes. With increasing levels of repeatability and reproducibility, performance becomes scalable.

Paper work is smooth. (all puns fully intended.) Unfortunately, Paper will eventually lead to "doing efficiently that which should not be done at all" (ref. Peter Drucker) - and the biggest threat to businesses is investing into results nobody needs.

Scissors = Disruption

Scissors cut through waste, inefficiency and outdated practices. A play of Scissors is leading innovation, making changes, and turning processes upside down - doing something new, or in ways that were never tried (here) before.

The opportunity of Scissors are immense - and yet, an overuse of the Scissors kills productivity: It destabilizes the organization, causing confusion and chaos.

So then - what is the best move? None.

Let me explain.

There's No Single Best Move

Every move creates the conditions for its own counter:

• Rock sets the basis for productivity - but ultimately, Rock itself is unproductive. Hence playing Rock means that Paper (being productive) becomes the next best move.
• Paper means being productive - but also, outdating. A prolonged period of playing Paper must be followed by a play of Scissors (change).
• Scissors cuts the waste - but it causes chaos: forcing Rock (stability).

The Real Complexity: The System Remembers

Middle management is a game played over time and not in isolation. Past moves shape future conditions. There are other players (your fellow middle managers, your teams - and your customers.) To win, you must think several steps ahead:

• Focus on Rock - and you'll lose to Paper. The player who plays Paper in a game of Rock, Rock, Rock - becomes the winner by default: being a results-driver an environment valuing process conformity over outcomes will be a refreshing change to senior leadership.
• Focus on Paper - and you will struggle with Scissors. The player who brings a novel idea into a stagnant organisation wins, as even small, actionable changes can make a world of a difference.
• Focus on Scissors - and you can't handle Rock. When you're constantly facing the reinforcement of status quo, change will be ineffective - regardless of how good and necessary.

Moving in sequence

And now comes the key challenge: "what should you play next?"

Let's explain what the real problem here is: You're playing a Multiway Rock-Scissors-Paper. You're playing against others (a solvable problem), but you are simultaneously playing against your own past and your own future.

We have established that if you played Rock yesterday, your best move today is probably Paper. And if you play Paper today, your best move tomorrow is Scissors. And after Scissors, you'll have to play Rock again.

But that means that you've got to make a tradeoff between scoring today, and scoring tomorrow. And you can only score today if you prepared for it yesterday.

So then, it's all clear: Play Rock, Paper and Scissors in succession.

Right?

Well - not so quick!

Making a winning move

Even if we assume a fully predictable system - the issue is that you're not playing alone. You're competing with other managers on budget, with other companies on market share, and with customers on business versus customer needs.

So if you played "Rock" yesterday, and you're fully predictable, a competitor will play Scissors on you - because you'll be playing Paper today, and that means, you'll lose.

But then - if you can't play Paper, should you play Rock? Well, then you're not being productive, and then your customers will play Paper on you.

Wouldn't that mean the safest bet after a Rock move is Scissors? Yes.

Except - because it's the safest bet, others will prepare for you playing Scissors by playing Rock.

So you should play Paper?

You see where this is going.

Your own predictability is reducing your odds of making a winning move - so your best chance is to not create any hints on what your next move could be.

The winning strategy: unpredictability

We've discovered that being predictable is a losing strategy.

And a manager always playing the same move is definitely predictable - hence, a single move can not be a successful strategy.

We've also seen that a sequence is also predictable, so "Stabilize, Perform, Disrupt" as a cycle is also not a winning strategy.

That leaves only one strategy for success:

• Play all three moves dynamically, and never lock into a single mode.
• Introduce controlled unpredictability to avoid becoming exploitable.
• Plan for future moves (n+2), not just the next one (n+1).
• Break your own pattern before the system forces you to.

And the desire for Predictability? That's the Problem.

Stakeholders constantly demand predictability: "We need a roadmap." "We need a deadline." "We need clear processes." "We need clear roles." Oddly enough, these demands create the very unpredictability they despise:

• Playing Rock (stability) reduces performance, requiring a rapid move to Paper (performance). And that means less focus on "How", and more focus on "What and When."
• Playing Paper (performance) leads to stagnation, inviting Scissors (disruption). This is going to be uncomfortable, but the only way to remain in business.
• Playing Scissors (innovation) leads to chaos, demanding a follow-up with some solid Rock (stability). But the people who thrive in creative chaos are the first who leave when things get cast in stone.

There’s No Easy Way Out - just a smarter way to play

The fundamental truth of middle management is that it is not a "problem that can be solved:" it is a system that must be navigated.

• Expect stability, and you'll be blindsided.
• Expect performance, and you'll be sidelined.
• Expect innovation, and you'll be slowed down.

Winning in middle management isn't about picking the right move - it's about ensuring you remain ahead of the game and are ready to make your move at the right time.

The only way to be sustainably successful in middle management is that you must know all three moves, you must know how to play them well, you must know when to play them - and what to do when one is being played on you. And why you can't win by locking in any of them.

So, the next time someone asks "predictability in middle management" - just smile. Because now, you know the truth: Good luck.

Organisational GRIT

Many people wonder, "What's the difference between a successful organisation, and one that struggles?"
Throughout my decades of consulting and observation, I have observed four factors that I call "GRIT."
Take heed of these, and you're most likely in good shape. On the other hand, ignore these at your own risk.

The GRIT Factors

When analysing what's going on in a company, there are four factors at play that create GRIT - in healthy organisations, these are naturally tended to and require little effort.

However, unhealthy systems of work neglect one or more of these, with dire consequences:

Goals

The first factor of a healthy system of work is that people have clear goals: things we want to achieve in the future. That can be the personal goals, team goals, business goals.

Best case, everyone has all of these - and all of them align.

Worst case, people have no goals, in which case they will show up just to get paid.

The worst case scenario lends itself to all kind of doomsday scenarios for a business owner: nothing getting done, people wasting their time with unfruitful conflict, or people leaving to make more from their life.

Relationships

The second factor of a healthy system of work is that people have positive relationships with the people around them. That includes their team, other departments, business partners and customers.

Best case, everyone has sustainable, sufficiently close relationships that make their network resilient.

Worst case, people's relationships are toxic or adversarial.

I don't think it requires further explanation what happens when the customer is treated like an enemy - but many organisations seem to be entirely oblivious to the cost in time, effort - and ultimately money - that is wasted with infighting.

Improvement

The third factor of a healthy system of work is that people continuously pursue improvement at all levels: make work faster, easier, better. Reduce risk, friction, cost. Make customers happier. Go home with less stress and more happiness.

Best case, the system of work makes that a natural part of the work, and everyone actively contributes.

Worst case, processes and tools deteriorate and everyone is looking the other way.

It's easy to figure out what happens when improvement is not part of people's thoughts or actions, but that's the reality in many organisations: The tyranny of the Urgent makes improvement fall over the edge until the cost of fixing things has reached frightening levels, and people are scared to even get started.

Tomorrow

The fourth factor of a healthy system of work sounds very abstract - "tomorrow" - so let me make it a bit more tangible: Tomorrow, a competitor may arrive on the market. Your business model may get disrupted. A key player in your team may move on. Are you prepared?

Best case, the company is constantly and persistently putting efforts into being prepared for the uncertainties and inevitabilities of tomorrow, and people are not scared to look into the future.

Worst case, everyone knows that the business is heading downhill, but people close their eyes to this uncomfortable reality. And with every day, the looming specter of Tomorrow becomes more threatening.

It doesn't take a lot of imagination where a company is headed when they have no plans for Tomorrow. And yet, few can articulate a clear plan.

Building GRIT

Building a company with GRIT is easy if that's how you've always done it. But if you've never done it, it's staggeringly hard. In fact, it seems insurmountable. So I'll give you a few pointers for getting started on the journey of building GRIT.

1. Itemize the most important Challenges, Opportunities and ongoing Activities in each sector.
2. If a sector has few or no items in it, it's a blind spot. Take some time to think!
3. Ask yourself, "How can we improve our situation?"
4. Take action on the first item and see where it leads you.

Now, that wasn't hard, isn't it?

From now, you may frequently revisit your GRIT matrix, see what pops up and whether you're making progress.

By taking GRIT building serious, you will see a significant reduction in risk, stress and fear - and significant boosts in sustainability, employee satisfaction and business outcomes.

Give it a try!