Watching a winning football team can sometimes feel like watching chemistry in action. The synchronicity is striking: every player seems to know instinctively when to press, when to drop back, and who covers the runner, without a single shout of instruction.
It looks like chemistry.
But here’s the catch: chemistry is the product we observe in successful teams, not the root cause of sustained success.
Teams don’t win because they have chemistry. They have chemistry because they are clear on what they are trying to achieve, how they will do it, and what they can expect from each other.
The State of Play
Leaders often fall into the trap of trying to optimise for chemistry. They curate personalities, stack teams with the right mix, and hope people will naturally click. But research consistently shows this is not what drives repeatable, high-level performance.
What matters most is clarity. The ability to build and maintain shared mental models that allow teams to coordinate under pressure, adapt quickly when conditions change, and keep delivering even as people rotate in and out.
The evidence is compelling:
- Organisations with clear, consistent operating models contribute to top-quartile performance, delivering 15% faster revenue growth and 24% higher operating margins.
- Employees who strongly agree their goals are clear are 3.6× more likely to be engaged at work.
- Decades of organisational psychology research show that team cognition, the shared understanding of tasks, roles, and strategies, is one of the strongest predictors of team effectiveness, particularly in dynamic, high-stakes environments.
In short, clarity scales. Chemistry does not.
The Mindflick: Playing a Repeatable Game
If chemistry is the by-product, not the driver, what conditions allow teams to consistently create it? The answer is embedding clarity across four dimensions.
- What we are trying to achieve (goals, purpose).
- Who does what (roles, responsibilities).
- How we work together (strategies, rules of engagement, processes).
- What to expect from each other (trust in competence and behaviour).
At Mindflick, we call this playing a repeatable game. Just as great football clubs develop a tactical identity so clear that new players can slot in without missing a beat, business teams thrive when clarity becomes habitual.
It is less about who happens to be in the room and more about the systems that allow any capable group of people to align quickly and deliver at a high standard.
When clarity becomes the daily operating rhythm, chemistry takes care of itself.