'Pinky and the Brain' Teams Are Screwing Up Your Business
You Don't Need Better People, You Need Better Teams
Most large companies have what I like to call ‘Pinky and the Brain’ teams.
If you’re not familiar with the TV series Pinky and the Brain, it’s about two genetically engineered mice who try to conquer the world every night. Brain is a scheming genius, while Pinky enthusiastically hops along for the ride.
Every episode ends the same way: Brain is grumpy (see picture) because they failed yet again to take over the world.
Despite being a super-genius capable of inventing anything: from a mind-control cap to the “Humilityinator” (designed to humble people into submission), or even a celebrity clone generator, Brain's brilliance is never enough to conquer the world.
Somehow, Pinky always finds a way to derail everything. Why do most companies have Pinky and the Brain teams? Please allow me to explain.
Pinky and the Brain - Competent Individuals Vs. Competent Teams
Pinky and the Brain is a team that’s individually competent, but collectively incompetent.
If Pinky would follow Brain’s lead, they’d actually have more than enough individual competence to conquer the world together. That’s how brilliant Brain is. But sadly their combined incompetence always guarantees failure.
Collective incompetence is the real issue inside most large companies. They don’t need better people, they need people to work better together. Easy to say, extremely hard to do.
Large companies are filled with Brains and Pinkys who are actively sabotaging each other. I want to stress, Pinky doesn’t even have to be an individual who screws things up. It could simply be the way your organization is structured, or the processes, rules and policies your Brains are forced to follow. Most companies have sprinkled Pinkys in every layer of the organization from the top to the bottom.
As a consequence, leadership often believes that that they need better people: so they hire more and better Brains. But because they never get rid of the Pinkys, their Brains will never get a chance to shine.
At large companies, it’s often not about having better people, it’s about having better collective competence. It’s about removing the obstacles that stand in the way of better teams.
What does collective competence look like?
What’s Collective Competence?
A great example of collective competence is the ice hockey team from The Mighty Ducks.
If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s about a ragtag group of misfits that’s unskilled, undisciplined, and totally dysfunctional. But over time, they learn to bring out the best in each other. Spoiler: the incompetent Mighty Ducks beat the team with the best individuals - the Hawks.
What you see with The Mighty Ducks is exactly what plays out at many startups and scale-ups. They don't have the raw talent or resources of big companies, but they work hard to make it work. By building trust, playing as a team, and maximizing what they have, they often outperform companies with far greater individual competence.
The best teams I’ve worked with, never had the best people. Read that sentence again, and let it sink in.
The companies that could afford the best people had the worst environments for great teamwork. Large companies can learn something important from start-ups and scale-ups. Smaller companies usually can’t afford the top 1% of talent, so they focus much more on building collective competence than individual competence.
It’s not about having the best people, it’s about getting people to work best together. They understand their only shot at winning is to be more like the Mighty Ducks: to punch above their weight by increasing collective competence through strong teamwork.
We can visualize individual and collective competence using the following two by two matrix:
If you’ve got low individual competence, and low collective competence, then you’ve got Minions. It’s a team that sucks individually and brings out the worst in each other. Minions make for a funny family movie, but for a terrible team. Minions teams are pretty rare in my experience, there nearly always are some individuals who stand out from the rest.
Most of the teams I’ve worked with either fit in the Mighty Ducks or the Pinky and the Brain category. It’s extremely rare to encounter a team that has both high individual competence and high collective competence, mostly because most organizations rock at sabotaging collective competence.
Companies often don’t distinguish between individual competence and collective competence. As a consequence, they believe they have a Minions situation going on, where the right course of action is to hire more Brains. While the reality is that the problem having more individually competent people isn’t going to solve their problem, because the bottleneck lies in their collective competence. They have enough Brains, but they need less Pinkys.
As a consequence, The Avengers dream team with super powers forever stays out of reach, because they are unable to get rid of the Pinkys who stand in the way of their Brains.
Stop Sabotaging Collective Competence
Long story short: if you want to have the best teams, you should focus on building collective competence. That doesn’t mean hiring more Brains, but making sure they are fewer Pinkys standing in the way of your Brains.
As otherwise, the way your team performs will play out like an episode of Pinky and the Brain with the following ending:
Pinky: “What are we going to do tomorrow night, Brain?”
Brain: “The same thing we do every night, Pinky—try to take over the world!
I did not get this:
"They have enough Brains, but they need more Pinkys." isn't that rather
"They have enough Brains, but they need less(!) Pinkys."? 🤔
As a former top-level synchronized skater, I can totally confirm this. Unfortunately, a lot of companies don’t really get what actual teamwork looks like. They build cultures around individual heroes: people who are there to shine on their own. And that kills real team performance. The full potential of the group never surfaces, because everything’s geared toward solo wins. A great team needs a shared purpose, a clear goal, and a sense of moving forward together. That’s when the magic happens.