An effective leadership exercise I use seemingly has nothing to do with business.

A leadership team is told their helicopter has crashed in the Canadian wilderness. They have limited supplies, incomplete information, and a single objective: survive.

The scenario sounds simple. That's part of the point.

Nobody in the room is a wilderness expert. The CFO knows no more than the COO. The CEO doesn't get an advantage because of their title. Everyone starts with roughly the same amount of information and the same level of uncertainty.

That's what makes the exercise so revealing.

When you strip away hierarchy, functional expertise, and organizational politics, what you're left with is the team's ability to solve a problem together.

Human Synergistics developed these simulations decades ago to demonstrate the value of participative decision-making and synergy: the idea that a group can produce a better solution than even its strongest individual member when it effectively uses the knowledge already present in the room.

In more than 90% of the structured problem-solving simulations I've run with leadership teams, that's exactly what happens.

The team outperforms every individual in the room.
Not most individuals. Every individual.

The team's collective score beats the strongest individual score more often than not.

The surprising part isn't that teams are capable of doing this.

It's how often they don't.

What Normal Meetings Hide

Most leadership teams believe they're collaborative.

They have standing meetings. Slack channels. Quarterly offsites. They generally enjoy working together.

Then we run the simulation.

That initial confidence rarely survives the first twenty minutes.

Normal meetings don't reveal how a team solves problems. They reveal habits: who speaks first, who gets interrupted, who gets heard, who stays quiet, and who everyone looks at when the room becomes uncertain.

A structured simulation strips away the politics, history, and familiarity of everyday work. Suddenly the team has to solve a problem together with incomplete information, limited time, and no obvious answer.

What happens next tells you almost everything about how the team actually operates.

The Knowledge Nobody Knows They Have

One of the first things effective teams do is take inventory of the skills and experience available to them.

Who has relevant experience? Who has solved something similar before? Who knows something the rest of us don't?

Most leadership teams never ask those questions directly.

Instead, they rely on titles.

I ran a simulation with a leadership team where the CFO produced the strongest individual score. He had wilderness experience and understood survival situations better than anyone else in the room.

Nobody knew it.

He was introverted. Everyone saw him as the numbers guy. Nobody thought to ask what else he knew and he wasn't the type to force himself into the conversation.

A case where the team scored worse than their best individual.

Not because the knowledge wasn't there. It was. He had it.

The best teams naturally perform a kind of skills inventory before they start solving the problem. They look beyond titles and ask what experience, perspective, and expertise each person brings to the table.

Most leadership teams assume they already know.

The simulation reveals how often they're wrong.

The Democracy Trap

One of the more surprising findings from these simulations is that democracy doesn't work nearly as well as people think.

Often, a team first discusses what “system” they want to use to solve the problem.
Some teams decide the most rational approach is to average everyone's answers together and let the spreadsheet decide.

It's clean. Objective. Efficient.
No other discussion necessary.

It also consistently underperforms.

Why?
Because averaging answers isn't collaboration. It's arithmetic.

The team avoids the difficult work of understanding why people disagree. Nobody has to defend their reasoning. Nobody has to challenge assumptions. Nobody has to persuade anyone else.

The group reaches an answer without ever really reaching understanding.

The highest-performing teams don't vote and they don't average.

They work toward consensus.

Not unanimous agreement. Shared understanding.

They spend time exploring why people see the situation differently. In the process, information emerges that never would have surfaced through a vote.

The quality of the discussion improves.

So does the quality of the decision.

Abdication Looks Like Collaboration

The second pattern that hurts teams is more subtle.

I call it abdication.

Nobody announces it. It happens quietly.

Someone in the room has a stronger personality. More confidence. More experience. A bigger title. The group decides, consciously or not, that this person probably has the answer.

From that moment forward, the meeting changes.

People still contribute, but they stop feeling responsible for the outcome.

The conversation becomes consultative instead of collaborative.

Years ago, I was on a team with a peer who fit that description perfectly. Brilliant. Confident. Highly capable. Everyone deferred to them.

Our team performed worse than every other team in the room.

Twenty years later, we were cofounders of a company.
The dynamic hadn't changed.

The lesson wasn't that they were wrong.

The lesson was that once a team abdicates responsibility to one voice, it stops functioning like a team.

Many leadership teams think they're collaborating when they're really just waiting for the smartest or most senior person to decide.

Over time, the group becomes dependent on one person to think, decide, and break ties. That's a lot of pressure on the individual and a waste of the expertise sitting around them.

The answer may already be in the room. The team has simply stopped looking for it.

What Winning Teams Do Differently

The teams that perform best aren't necessarily smarter.

They're more intentional.

They establish strategy before tactics. In a survival scenario, the first question isn't which item matters most. It's whether you're staying put or trying to move. That decision changes everything else.

They do the easy work first, clustering the obvious answers at the top and bottom of the list and spending their time debating the harder decisions in the middle.

Most importantly, they actively pull in quieter voices.

They understand something many leadership teams forget: the goal isn't participation. The goal is access to information.

Someone in the room knows something the rest of the group doesn't know. Or sees things differently and asks the better questions.

The best teams find it.

What Changes When Teams See It

The value of the simulation isn't the score.

It's what people learn about themselves.

For ninety minutes, everyone is working from the same information. The team can't hide behind titles, organizational silos, or side conversations and backchannels. They have to solve the problem together.

Teams see who dominates discussion. They see who withdraws. They see what happens when authority overrides collaboration. Most importantly, they develop a shared language for talking about those dynamics afterward.

Years ago when CDNOW was purchased by Bertelsmann, my peer Tom and I realized our boss, George, was giving each of us different directions in separate one-on-one meetings.

Because Tom and I had our own regular one-on-ones (my “leading with influence”), we compared notes.

The contradiction became obvious.

I asked for a meeting with all three of us.

George could no longer give different answers to different people.

What emerged wasn't the answer I wanted. My division was eventually folded into Tom's.
And we finally had clarity.

And once we understood the situation, we could work together effectively.

That's what good collaboration produces.

Not necessarily the outcome you wanted.

A better decision that people can actually execute.

What CEOs Should Take From This

Most CEOs read something like this and focus on the people around them.

I think they should focus on themselves.

The leader's job isn't to have the answer.

It's to create conditions where the best answer can emerge.

That means encouraging disagreement without punishment. Creating opportunities for information to move across functions. Making it safe for people to challenge assumptions, including your own.

The highest-performing teams in these simulations don't succeed because they have the smartest leader.

They succeed because nobody in the room is waiting for one person to have all the answers.

Don't Wait for the Pain

Most teams come to this work when something is already wrong. Missing goals, morale slipping, decisions getting relitigated, cross-functional work feeling exhausting, and nobody trusting each other.

By then, the patterns are entrenched.

The work gets harder.

The teams that benefit most from these simulations aren't usually the dysfunctional ones.
They're the teams that feel fine.

A newly formed leadership team. A company that's grown quickly. A group that's never been tested under pressure.

The exercise takes less than ninety minutes.
The lessons often last years.
The team almost always wins.

The only question is whether you've built one.