The Right Players: How to Build a Team Designed for the Work Ahead

When Herb Brooks selected the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, he famously told an assistant: “I’m not looking for the best players… I’m looking for the right ones.”

I’ve loved that line ever since I first heard it. And I’ve carried it with me through years in program delivery. Because the truth is, when the pressure’s on and the work is complex, the “best” people on paper are often not the ones you actually need.

This isn’t an argument against talent. It’s an argument against the way most organizations think about team composition — by default, by seniority, by who’s available, by who’s most visible. Teams built that way can be technically impressive and still fall short of what the moment requires.

The Expert Trap

There’s a particular dynamic that plays out in complex projects with predictable regularity. Leadership identifies the most experienced people in a given domain and puts them on the team. These are the people who know the current system best, who can speak to every edge case, who’ve been around long enough to have opinions about every prior attempt at change.

And then things get stuck.

Not because these people aren’t capable — they clearly are. But because deep expertise in the current state can be a liability when the goal is to build a different future. The people who know the most about how things work today often have the strongest attachment to preserving the logic of how things work today. They’re solving for familiarity. The project needs people solving for possibility.

I saw this play out directly while leading a system overhaul across a multi-division organization — legacy processes, skeptical teams, and strong institutional memory on all sides. When it came time to staff the core project team, we were offered the usual suspects: long-tenured employees who knew the current system backward and forward.

We made a different call. We moved the deep-domain experts into a stakeholder advisory group — still involved, still consulted, still valued — and built the core project team with curious, system-oriented thinkers, even where they had less experience with the current tool. We also deliberately added one team member known for being a constructive pessimist: someone who would spot risks before they became problems and bring mitigation options, not just objections.

The result wasn’t a team of top performers by conventional metrics. It was a team designed for the specific work ahead.

What the Research Actually Says

The instinct to build teams from the most individually capable people is understandable. It’s also, in complex environments, often wrong.

Scott Page and Lu Hong’s research demonstrated that diverse problem-solving teams consistently outperform groups composed of the highest-ability individuals. The mechanism isn’t mysterious: different cognitive approaches — different ways of framing a problem, different assumptions about what matters, different heuristics for generating solutions — produce more and better options than any single high-performing perspective can.

This matters most when the problem itself is uncertain or novel. If the task is well-defined and the path is clear, a team of experts may be exactly what you need. But complex organizational challenges — system overhauls, transformation programs, cross-functional initiatives — rarely present as well-defined. They require a team that can navigate ambiguity, surface hidden assumptions, and adapt as new information arrives.

The implication is uncomfortable but important: your most experienced subject matter experts may not belong at the center of the work. They may belong at the edges — as advisors and validators — while the core team is built around cognitive range.

Designing Around Archetypes

One of the most useful frameworks I’ve applied to project team design involves thinking not in job titles or functional roles, but in the kinds of thinking different people bring to a team.

The Visionary holds the big picture. They’re oriented toward what’s possible rather than what’s precedented. They challenge the team to think beyond the obvious solution and resist the pull toward incrementalism. Without a Visionary, teams can execute well against a mediocre target.

The Challenger asks the hard questions. They’re suspicious of assumptions, alert to risks, and willing to say what others are reluctant to voice. The qualifier ‘constructive’ matters: a Challenger who only raises problems is a bottleneck. A Challenger who raises problems and stays engaged with solutions is insurance against avoidable failure.

The Pragmatist keeps the team tethered to reality. They know what’s actually buildable, what the organization can absorb, and which constraints are real versus imagined. Without a Pragmatist, visionary thinking disconnects from execution.

The Connector works across silos. They know who needs to be informed, who’s been left out of a conversation that will affect them, and where misalignment is quietly forming. On complex cross-functional programs, the absence of a good Connector is often where alignment quietly collapses.

The Executor makes it happen. They track dependencies, meet deadlines, and translate decisions into action. Without an Executor, teams can have excellent conversations that produce nothing.

Most people carry two or three of these in different proportions, and context matters — someone who is a Challenger on one team becomes the Pragmatist on another. But mapping your team against these roles is a useful diagnostic. If everyone skews toward execution, you’ll move fast in the wrong direction. If everyone skews toward vision and challenge, you’ll have excellent debates and miss your milestones.

The Constructive Pessimist Is Not Optional

The Challenger archetype is the one most often left off teams — or more precisely, it’s the disposition that gets filtered out during team formation. Leaders assembling teams tend to favor people who are visibly enthusiastic about the work. Enthusiasm reads as commitment. Skepticism reads as resistance. And so the people who ask hard questions often don’t make the list.

This is a significant and underappreciated failure mode. The constructive pessimist isn’t someone who slows the team down. They’re someone who prevents the team from moving confidently toward a foreseeable wall.

Building this into your team design isn’t about finding people who are negative by nature. It’s about creating space for honest assessment of what might go wrong — and valuing that assessment rather than treating it as a morale problem. Make it explicit that skepticism is an asset. That framing changes how the person shows up and how the rest of the team receives their input.

Reframing What Subject Matter Experts Are For

None of this means domain experts don’t matter. They do — enormously. The question is how you deploy them.

Deep expertise is best suited for validation: stress-testing decisions, catching domain-specific errors, identifying edge cases that generalists would miss. That work is critical. It’s just not the same as the work of designing what comes next.

The most effective approach is to structure expert involvement as a deliberate advisory relationship — bringing SMEs in at key moments to pressure-test decisions, rather than embedding them in the core team where their attachment to the current state creates drag. This also tends to work better for the experts themselves. They remain genuinely valued and consulted, which matters for engagement and for the organizational relationships you’ll need when it’s time to implement.

Five Principles for Teams Designed to Succeed

Design for the work, not the org chart. Start from what the work actually requires — the cognitive range, the relational reach, the specific capabilities — and work backward to who belongs on the team.

Map the archetypes before you finalize the roster. A simple conversation about which archetypes are present and which are missing will surface gaps that credentials alone won’t reveal.

Reframe your SMEs’ role deliberately. Don’t sideline them — that creates resentment and loses valuable knowledge. Create a structured advisory relationship that uses their expertise at the right moments.

Invite the constructive pessimist. Find someone who will name the risks clearly and stay engaged with solving them. Their skepticism, well-positioned, is your best insurance policy.

Hold the outcome in view throughout. Team composition isn’t a one-time decision. As the work evolves, what the team needs will change. Stay attentive to whether the people around the table are still the right people for the current phase.

Teams Are Designed, Not Assembled

The best teams I’ve been part of weren’t assembled by default. They were designed with intention, awareness of what the work required, and enough friction built in to prevent groupthink from going unchallenged.

The next time you’re forming a team, the questions worth sitting with aren’t just “who’s available?” or “who knows this area best?” They’re: What kind of work is ahead? What range of thinking does this challenge actually require? Who will challenge our blind spots before they become expensive mistakes?

The right team for the moment is rarely a roster of the most individually impressive players. It’s a system — designed to do something specific, together, under pressure. That’s the work of team design. And it starts before the project begins.