Fabio Ynoe de Moraes, Associate Professor at Queen’s University, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“The Most Dangerous Myth in Medicine: That Talent Alone Wins
In 2025, I was once again responsable to lead the Queen’s Global Oncology Program.
The team was exceptional. Multi-talented. Internationally accomplished. Clinically and academically respected.
On paper, this should have been easy.
It wasn’t.
If you lead a team — in healthcare, research, or innovation — read this.
It may change how you think about leadership forever.
I am using my patent RIVIO framework here (Do you want to learn more?)
R — Reality Most teams don’t fail because they lack talent. They fail because they over-invest in individual brilliance and under-design collective intelligence.
We keep searching for the ‘genius leader.’ The evidence — and lived experience — suggest that strategy is obsolete.
I — Insight After reading Team Intelligence by Jon Levy, one idea is impossible to ignore:
The best teams are not built by adding more stars. They are built by engineering better conditions.
The highest-impact leaders are rarely the smartest person in the room. They are architects of trust, psychological safety, and coordinated thinking.
In medicine, this is painfully obvious:
Multidisciplinary tumor boards with weak dynamics underperform.
Brilliant researchers working in silos slow discovery.
Teams with clarity, mutual respect, and shared ownership outperform — even with fewer resources.
V — Value Healthcare has entered an era of:
Extreme clinical and scientific complexity
AI-augmented decision-making
Global, multi-disciplinary collaboration
No single clinician, PI, or executive can ‘out-think’ the system anymore.
The real competitive advantage is no longer IQ. It is Team Intelligence:
Psychological safety > hierarchy
Complementarity > ego
Collective sense-making > individual heroics
This applies to hospitals, research labs, startups, and global health systems alike.
I — Implementation If you lead a team, ask yourself — honestly:
- Do people feel safe disagreeing with me?
- Are the quietest voices consistently heard?
- Do we reward individual output or collective outcomes?
- Am I solving problems myself — or designing conditions so the team solves them?
Modern leadership is less about having answers. It’s about creating the environment where better answers emerge.
O — Outcome The future of medicine will not be shaped by lone geniuses. It will be shaped by teams that think better together than anyone can alone.
If you’re building teams, training residents, leading research groups, or redesigning health systems — this shift is unavoidable.
In your experience, what mattered more: individual brilliance or team dynamics?”
More posts featuring Fabio Ynoe de Moraes.