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When seeking improvement in teams we generally face two choices:

1. Try something new and interesting, ideally something that can be compressed into an awayday session. It's easy - we will never be short of New Sexy Ideas (NSIs); things like psychological safety, radical candour, psychometric profiling. Choose your poison.

2. Stop doing the unproductive shit that everyone knows is causing damage.

What do most people choose? In my experience, it's option 1. Why? Most NSIs are plausible and talk to real problems. And who doesn't want to feel like they are being innovative and positive – it can make the team feel good and show management we are on the ball. Probably the most important reason to pick an NSI is that it means we don't have to directly deal with the tough baked-in problems the team might be facing.

My personal take is that you'll often get more from stopping the things that erode value than from adding something new on top. In this episode of Decision Nerds, we explore Charlie Munger's exhortation to 'Invert, always invert' with Andy Evans, an industry veteran who's written an excellent note on this issue. If you haven't come across inversion before, the idea is that instead of asking how to achieve success, you ask what causes failure and try to systematically avoid those pitfalls.

We focus on one of the most challenging issues in investment management – how to make a team work effectively – covering everything from terrible incentive structures to why we promote the wrong people. Discussing teams and their problems can easily turn into a whingeathon, so we also offer some simple, practical fixes to make team life more enjoyable and effective.

Feel free to listen to this as a team, with your own 'Jeez, do we do that?' bingo card.

Andy' note can be downloaded here.