The managers who came on courses at Henley Management College in England played a game. They were divided into companies that competed in a business simulation called the Executive Management Exercise. Meredith Belbin and his researchers watched how each company worked. According to the Belbin company’s account of the research, every participant also completed a battery of psychometric tests.
One of those tests, the Critical Thinking Appraisal, measured mental ability. That made an obvious experiment possible. Belbin posed the question at the start of a chapter in his 1981 book Management Teams: “Given a free choice of members and the need to form a high-powered management team, how should we go about it?”
The obvious answer was to pick the cleverest people. So the researchers built companies that, in Belbin’s phrase, hoarded mental ability, and called each one an Apollo company. The other course members, he wrote, reacted immediately. They recognized the Apollo company for what it was.
The Apollo company of what Belbin called “supposed super-talent” did not win. “The Apollo team finished last,” he wrote, and he described what went with it as “mutual recriminations.”
“Promising experiments always need to be repeated,” Belbin wrote, and his team repeated it. By his count, of twenty-five companies built to the Apollo design, only three won. The most common finish, out of eight, was sixth, which happened six times. Fourth came next, four times. “It amazed many Henley members that companies comprising clever people” did so badly, he wrote.
The researchers watched where the time went. Apollo members, by Belbin’s account, had spent much of it “engaged in abortive debate,” each trying to bring the others round to his own well-argued view. The few Apollo companies that did well, he suggested, owed a lot to the character of their chairman.
Over the years the researchers sorted out the behaviors that winning companies seemed to have and losing ones lacked. The Belbin company’s account says the first cluster they named was the organized, practical Implementer, and that teams made up only of Implementers lacked creativity and flexibility. The researchers then picked out people with a creative disposition and planted one in each team. They called them Plants. One by one, more clusters emerged. A ninth, the Specialist, came only after the research, when Belbin began applying it in industry.
Belbin called the chapter “The Apollo Syndrome.” In his telling, the clever companies hadn’t lost for lack of brains. They had spent their time arguing, each member sure of his own case.