The Equation That Explains Why Good Teams Fail

The equation didn’t start with us. It started with Bernard Jackman.

Bernard — former Irish rugby international, Leinster hooker, head coach of Grenoble and the Dragons — framed it simply:

Outcome = Capability x Behaviours

Not plus. Multiplied by.

When my business partner Kieran Neeson and I encountered this, something clicked. This wasn’t just a rugby insight. This explained exactly why good, talented teams fail to deliver — something we’d both been watching for years across engineering, delivery, and leadership. And the more we pulled at it, the bigger it got.

Why multiplication matters

A team with world-class capability and broken behaviours doesn’t just underperform — the behaviours drag capability toward zero. And a team with modest capability and strong behaviours punches way above its weight.

I’ve seen it happen over and over: brilliant engineers in dysfunctional teams delivering less than average engineers in healthy ones. The capability was never the variable. The behaviours were the multiplier.

Think about the best team you’ve ever been on. Were they the most talented people you’d worked with? Maybe. But more likely, what made them great was how they worked together:

• Decisions got made by the people closest to the problem
• Conflict was surfaced and resolved, not buried
• When someone made a mistake, the response was “how do we fix it?” not “whose fault is it?”
• Under pressure, the team got tighter, not looser

Now think about the worst team. Probably plenty of talent. But the behaviours — the politics, the blame, the avoidance, the decisions made three levels above the people doing the work — quietly multiplied all that capability by 0.3.

The fractal problem

Here’s where Kieran and I took Bernard’s equation further — and where it gets uncomfortable.

Most people think about team dysfunction at the team level. Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions and similar models focus on what’s happening inside the team. That’s important, but it’s incomplete.

Because the team manager — the person who might be the source of many of those problems — also sits within a separate, higher team. And that team has its own dysfunctions. Its own trust issues, its own fear of conflict, its own avoidance of accountability. And the leader of that team sits within another team. With its own problems.

It’s fractal. Dysfunction at every layer compounds downward.

But it doesn’t stop at the vertical. There are cross-team dysfunctions. Cross-department politics. Organisational culture problems. Competing incentives between divisions. Legacy power structures that nobody will name.

All of it compounds into a behavioural “score” — a multiplier that is either positive, negative, or neutral. And this is what determines whether capability actually reaches the outcome.

Why hiring the best people barely moves the needle

This is the insight that changed how we think about everything.

When an organisation with deeply broken behaviours hires exceptional talent, the capability side of the equation increases dramatically. But if the behavioural multiplier is 0.001 — crushed by layers of dysfunction, politics, and cultural debt — you get a tiny increment. You’ve gone from terrible to very slightly less terrible.

Or worse: the behavioural multiplier can be negative. An organisation where the culture actively works against its people — punishing honesty, rewarding politics, making decisions as far from the work as possible. In that case, adding more capability just means you get dragged down a little less. The talent churns out within eighteen months, exhausted and disillusioned, and the organisation concludes that “the talent market is tough.”

The talent market is fine. Your multiplier is the problem.

Why big organisations underperform

This also explains something that everyone observes but few can articulate: why large organisations so often perform worse than small ones, despite having vastly more capability.

A startup with ten people has a simple behavioural equation. One team, one leader, one culture. The multiplier is whatever it is — good or bad — but it’s singular.

A large organisation has dozens of teams, each with their own behavioural dynamics. Multiple management layers, each compounding their own dysfunctions downward. Cross-team dependencies introducing friction. Departmental silos creating misaligned incentives. Organisational culture sitting above all of it, setting the ceiling.

There are so many more factors in the behavioural equation that all impact performance in some way. Even if each layer only introduces a small drag, the compounding effect across the whole system can reduce the multiplier to almost nothing. All that capability. All that talent. Multiplied by a number very close to zero.

What to do with this

The equation is simple. The implications are not.

But start here: stop trying to fix outcomes by adding capability alone. Start watching the multiplier.

In The First Red, the coach Declan Maguire builds an entire framework around this — observing the behavioural signals that predict outcomes before the scoreboard changes. Reds, Blues, and Greens.

You don’t need a framework to start. Just ask yourself: in my team, in my organisation, what’s the behavioural multiplier right now? Is it amplifying our capability, or is it quietly compounding across every layer until there’s almost nothing left?

The answer is usually obvious. It’s just not on the dashboard.

The equation Outcome = Capability x Behaviours originated with Bernard Jackman. The fractal extension — and the realisation that this explains why good teams fail, why big organisations underperform, and why culture eats capability for breakfast — is the work Kieran Neeson and I are building at IMIRT.