Why Teams, Not Lone Geniuses, are Winning the Toughest Problems You Can't Outsource Common Sense, But You Can Organise It

Business is rife with a stubborn and deeply rooted myth: that the best solutions come from heroic individuals boldly leading the way toward greatness, the swashbuckling entrepreneur with a disruptive new idea, the workaholic inventor who overcomes all obstacles to create something new, or an intellectual visionary who sees the solution where no one else does. We worship these lone geniuses. They are celebrated in our history books, lauded on our magazine covers and splashed across news headlines and blog sites as if we would be lost without them. "The Thinker," complete with his chin down fist on mouth thinker pose (thanks, Mr. Rodin), has become perhaps the single most pervasive cliché for wisdom in business thinking today. Every Company wants this guy working for them so he can lead them through whatever nastiness they currently face. It's comforting. Elegant. And mostly wrong.

Team problem solving is not just some touchy feely HR initiative. It's a practical, testable way to deal with complexity, and the organisations that treat it as such (as opposed to booking a one off workshop) are the ones who make real change.

Shared purpose, messy process

Start with the obvious: collaboration works when people share an understanding of what needs to be solved and agree on what a successful outcome looks like. This all sounds cliché, but you'd be surprised how many workshops I've led where a group falls flat on its face because half the room thinks "customer churn" refers to pricing and the other half think it means customer onboarding. You have to have a common language and a shared destination.

Once you have that, the troops get it. They cut through turf wars. They show up. I believe, some will differ in their views, just witness the 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidates and those debates if you want confirmation of this observation, that setting that shared purpose is the single most important act a leader can take. In boardroom memos, strategy is overrated; in action, alignment is underrated.

Another point that might give pause: hierarchies, when low and loose, actually aid rather than thwart fast problem solving. Miracle brains are quashed by top down edicts (and so too, for that matter, are rigid hierarchies). But having a transparent, plane decision architecture makes it faster.

Diversity is never decorative

Diversity of thought is not a moral tick box. It's an economic advantage. When disciplines, backgrounds and cognitive styles are diverse, you have more paths to a solution. That's not just kumbaya sloganeering, it's backed up by hard evidence. Companies in the top quartile for ethnic and cultural diversity on executive teams were 36 percent more likely to experience above average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile, according to McKinsey's report last year.

Diversity makes you see what is seen from angles about which you didn't know. This plays out in practice. In one Sydney healthcare client, a multidisciplinary team, this included clinical staff, social workers and operations folks, redesigned the follow up of a certain type of patient. The technical fix was minor; the insight that unlocked it came from a social worker's perspective on obstacles to patient transport. Without that voice, the solution would have been hardly usable.

Cognition multiplied

Collaboration multiplies cognitive muscle. When people justify their thinking to others, they consolidate and test what they have learnt. That back and forth requires teams to confront assumptions and then tighten up solutions through criticism. It's about the distance between one person's half formed theory, on the one hand, and a collectively stress tested approach, on the other.

Groups aren't perfect. They are prone to groupthink, can grind to halt in endless consensus seeking or allow the loudest voices to prevail. But structured processes, such as clear division of roles, time limited debates and rules based on evidence to make decisions, limit those dangers. Facilitators matter. So do ground rules. So does the courage to call a bad idea what it is, or to worship a good one with zeal.

Skills that truly matter

Complex problem solving, critical thinking and creativity are the most important skills for employees in your workforce. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs report identifies these as important for 2025 and beyond. As a team practices, it's practising these capacities in real time: framing problems, testing hypotheses and iterating solutions.

That's why training in partnership isn't just a nice thing to do. Teaching people how to listen, how to surface assumptions, how to bring forward constructive feedback and synthesise divergent inputs, these are hands on capabilities. When teams have invested in these capabilities, we've seen clear analytical and quantitative gains. People become quicker at diagnosis. They iterate faster. They can call better under uncertainty.

Yes, empathy and emotion matter

Some worry that concentrating on emotional intelligence in problem solving distracts from objective work. I disagree. Emotional literacy, the ability to identify and manage emotions, read team dynamics, is a key accelerator. Teams who know where each other is coming from have to spend less time resolving interpersonal conflict and can take more time trying out new solutions. When people feel listened to, they participate more. Early on, the frustration is handled and the session remains productive.

That doesn't involve making every meeting a therapy session, it entails leaders paying attention to social cues, normalising dissent and treating psychological safety as a lever. The result? Smarter decisions that also stick.

Creativity through iteration

Creative ideas do not generally spring forth fully formed. They are built. One person lobs a strange idea; another twists it; a third confronts it; a fourth enlarges on it. The communal setting is an iteration engine. It's noisy. It's messy. And it's in that place that durable ideas are formed.

Encourage the "stupid" idea. Encourage non linear thinking. Reward iteration. Yet organisations that do it better, and faster. That's why tricks like rapid prototyping, cross functional hack days and structured brainstorming sprints continue to crop up in high performing teams. Atlassian, for instance, has publicly preached the virtues of team practices that institutionalise collaborative problem solving: they're an Australian success story demonstrating systematised creativity scales.

The currency is communication

Without good communication, collaboration falls apart. Not just talk, disciplined, active conversation. Active listening, accurate summarising and iterative clarification turn a roomful of opinions into an actionable plan.

Teams that focus on structured communication, think check ins, clarifying questions and shared documentation, can cut down on rework and misunderstandings. That's a low cost win with an outsize payoff.

And yes, remote work makes this more complicated. But it also pushes teams to be better at documentation, clearer in meetings and more intentional about shared artefacts. It is not remote, it's poor communication that is the enemy of collaboration.

Bias busting, decision boosting

Released as a product of collaboration is the delightful side effect of bias reduction. With multiple people interrogating the same data with different heuristics, you expose confirmation bias and single narrative traps. Diverse teams are more likely to act as devil's advocate and stress test assumptions.

This is not just theoretical, it's an example of the very downstream impact on profitability that a McKinsey finding I mentioned earlier captures. Better decisions, better outcomes. But be warned: diversity is not a panacea. Diversity plus inclusion, ensuring that every voice can speak and be heard, is the combination that moves decisions in the right direction.

Conflict as productivity

Many leaders are afraid of conflict. They shouldn't. Managed well, conflict is productive. It surfaces hidden trade offs. It forces choices. Collaborative negotiation creates the potential for parties to own solutions because they have had a hand in creating them.

Practical structures, such as interest based negotiation, timeboxed debates and decision matrices, help teams jostle their way through turmoil without getting stuck. Where I've watched teams fall apart is when conflict becomes personal. Stay focused on trade offs, evidence and outcomes. Keep it civil. And don't allow process lapses to turn into personality brawls.

Where collaboration works

Some are easier to spot than others, and some have more oomph.

• Healthcare: Multi specialty teams of doctors, improving patient outcomes through coordinated care plans. These teams reconcile clinical, social and operational constraints, and the outcome is an improved patient experience.
• Research & innovation: Complex scientific problems require 3 to 4 disciplines to work together. Cross pollination sets a fast pace for discovery.
• Community projects: Communities that coalesce local residents, Business owners and planners get ideas that are more implementable and equitable.
• Product design: Cross functional squads, comprising of engineering, product, customer service, marketing people, who build features at the intersection of technical feasibility and customer desirability.

From sector to sector, the through line is clear: Complex layers of problems are most effectively solved when different modes of expertise converge.

Leadership: design the environment, not the solution

Leaders tend to want to be the solver. Don't. The job of leadership is to architect an environment where teams can solve. That involves clear framing of the problem, identifying obstacles to its solution, defining time frames and holding people accountable. It requires an investment in facilitation skills, in data literacy, and in collaborative tools.

One leadership practice I preach: invest time on the front end of problem solving work. Frame the question crisply. Define success. Then step back. Let the team iterate. Be present to umpire, not to write every line of code or design every slide.

From tips to hacks that really work

• State the thing in a sentence, success in a paragraph. And then read them out at every meeting.
• Vary the team, and not just in role, but also in thinking style. Bring in someone who is sceptical; bring in someone who is passionate about the details.
• Timebox. Meetings that can be ended are even more productive.
• Use small experiments. Prototype quickly, fail cheaply, learn fast.
• Make conflict transparent. Assign a rotating "critical friend" role to make sure that someone is tasked with poking holes in proposals.
• Capture decisions. A simple note recording "what we decided, why, and what now?" saves time.
• Invest in facilitation. The honest and positive energy can be kept alive if the process, and indeed the people in it, are properly facilitated.

When collaboration fails

Learning from failure can be informative. Collaboration breaks down when praise becomes scarce or trust evaporates, when people don't share a common sense of purpose, when decisions take forever to emerge and some folks are allowed to hijack an otherwise fair process and run away with it. It too fails when leaders mistake collaboration for abdication, you can collaborate and still hold people responsible.

Obviously, the right thing to do is not always take a long time or arrive at ambiguous conclusions, particularly in a moment of crisis. But even then, there should be feedback loops. The model is a rhythm: collaborative design, decisive execution, iterative improvement.

Some contrarian takeaways

• Meetings aren't the enemy. Bad meetings are. With discipline, meetings can be the engine of alignment.
• Remote teams can beat colocated ones if they do this one thing. The bias that "face to face is always better" is no longer true.
• Consensus not required. Often unanimous agreement pales in comparison to shared understanding and clear decision rules.

These views make some people bristle, and that's OK. Arguing is in the model.

Last word

Collaborative problem solving isn't something on a soft skill checklist you get to cross off. It's a muscle you develop over projects, disciplines and time. It takes leadership, Organisation and humility. But the returns are real: better ideas, easier implementation and solutions that stick.

We deal with teams all over Australia, from Melbourne start ups to Canberra agencies, and the dynamic is consistent. Companies that make solving problems together a part of the routine get unstuck faster and innovate better. If you want a 21st century edge, the starting place is shoring up your teams as collaborators.

Sources & Notes

• McKinsey & Company (2020). Diversity wins: How inclusion matters. McKinsey Global Institute. (Finding cited: firms in the top quartile of executive board racial and ethnic diversity, 35 percent maniacally checked their stock prices every 10 minutes.)
• World Economic Forum (2020). The Future of Jobs Report 2020. (Cited for the importance of complex problem solving, critical thinking and creativity among future skills.)
• Australian Human Resources Institute (AHRI) (2022). State of the Sector Report. (Provided as one Australian sector viewpoint on L&D priorities; context is supplied by AHRI in relation to L&D investment and capability development requirements across Australia.)