Why isn’t the team delivering what it’s being asked to deliver? It’s a question most experienced managers have asked, with a combination of bafflement and frustration. When a group of empowered, motivated and bright people can’t do what they need to do, they become their leader’s main problem instead of the solution to their problems. But, looked at through a Darwinian lens, a low performance team is also an opportunity to evolve both the team and the company. As usual, spare me a few minutes and I’ll explain.

Over the decades, I’ve probably worked with as many low performance brand teams as high performance ones. Typically, their bosses assess them on the basis of their ability to execute important tasks, such as launch a new product or respond to some major competitive threat. And it’s this assessment that hinders the leader’s understanding, because such tasks depend on getting many things right, but can be derailed by a failure in one small part of the task. When that happens, it’s a double problem. Not only has the team underperformed, but its leader also often can’t see what it was that went wrong. This double problem is why teams fail, not just once but repeatedly.

When I explain this problem to senior managers, I often need to use a Darwinian metaphor from biology. Usefully, many of the people I help have backgrounds in drug development and so they’re familiar with the concept of being ‘metabolically impaired’. Metabolically impaired bacteria are engineered to lack one metabolic function for various purposes, such as target validation or drug screening. Using that metaphor reminds managers that an organism that lacks even one vital metabolic pathway can be functionally useless. The textbook example is bacteria that can’t make tryptophan and only survive if it is added to their growth medium. That biological metaphor helps my interlocutors to see that they need to ask what small but consequential functionality is missing from, and thereby hindering, their teams.

To put this metabolic metaphor to practical use requires a bit of detective work to track down the missing capability. It’s not unlike a post-mortem. For example, that unsuccessful launch could be attributed to many causes, from under-resourcing to the sales team’s commitment to medical’s engagement with the opinion leaders. Often, it’s tempting to blame a relatively macro-level issue like those, but insightful managers look beyond those proximate causes of failure to find the ultimate cause. In the case of one brand I helped with, the market research data pointed to the brand not resonating with the target prescribers that it was meant to engage with. But the smarter question was why the brand messaging didn’t resonate. After all, it had been developed at great cost and with the support of a very experienced agency. That pointed to the agency brief, but that had been written using a tried and tested template. There must, I suggested, be a problem with one of the processes, akin to a metabolic pathway, that led into the brief.

The culprit, the cause of the whole launch’s failure, was eventually tracked down to a small but essential process that connected the collated market research data to the ‘pen portrait’ of the target prescriber, which was an appendix to the brief. The insight team responsible for this was a group of highly skilled data crunchers, experienced in deductive analysis and testing hypotheses. It also had some great qualitative researchers with experience of inductive analysis of interviews and focus groups. But, despite its other talents, this team had never heard of the third flavour of logic, abductive reasoning. And lacking abductive capabilities rendered the brand team metabolically impaired.

If you’re not familiar with inductive, deductive and abductive reasoning, my word count means I have to tell you to google it. For the purposes of this column, however, there’s only one lesson you need to draw. One, hard-to-spot weakness can cause a huge, complex edifice (such as a launch plan) to collapse. But that weakness can be spotted by unravelling and deconstructing the processes, sub-processes and routines that a larger task involves. Here, the metabolically impaired analogy is a useful one, helping managers to drill down below proximate issues to ultimate issues such as, in this case, a lack of abductive capabilities. And, just like feeding tryptophan to a metabolically impaired bug, once spotted, the answer is obvious and achievable.