The Mastermind That Had to Build Its Own Mastermind First

Around 1990, long before I’d ever heard the phrase mastermind groups, a new national curriculum landed on every science department in the country at once. Somebody had to retrain the teachers who’d be delivering it in our borough. That somebody wasn’t me. It was the borough’s science adviser, a man who’d occasionally turned up on television science programmes and never once mentioned it himself. You’d never have known it from how he carried himself. He didn’t lead like someone with anything to prove.

He picked me to run the practical side of it.

I was a Senior Laboratory Technician at a school the authority had already scheduled for closure. That only mattered for one reason: it had lab space sitting available, so that’s where everyone met. The school had built its labs in Victorian times, and the benches were heavy English oak, varnished and stained. They carried decades of history in them.

Burns, scratches, old ink stains, carved graffiti here and there, someone’s initials, the odd declaration of love scratched in years before any of us arrived. I recognised some of those burns even then, an overturned tripod here, a Bunsen burner flame left too close there. Physics, chemistry, and biology all had their own labs like this. The newer labs never had quite the same character. I loved working in those labs. Every old bench had a story sitting under the varnish before you’d even switched anything on.

Every old bench had a story sitting under the varnish before you’d even switched anything on.

The teachers who turned up weren’t from my school at all. They came from right across the borough. All of them needed to get to grips with practical work under the new curriculum before it landed in their own classrooms.

The Mastermind Groups I Had to Build Before I Could Run One

Here’s the bit that doesn’t get mentioned when people talk about mastermind groups: sometimes you need one just to organise the one you’re actually trying to hold.

I had a handful of my own lab techs working under me. Before a single teacher walked into a lab, we had to mastermind the logistics ourselves. What equipment across how many benches. What materials would actually get used versus what would sit untouched. How resources would flow from a request at a bench, through me, down to whoever on my team could source it in time.

None of that existed until we sat down together and worked it out. It’s the same way any mastermind works. Several people bring what they know, argue it into shape, and land somewhere better than any one of them would have got to alone.

Sometimes you need a mastermind just to organise the one you’re actually trying to hold.

A Week of Circuses, Rotating Through Every Lab

The whole thing ran across a full week. We set up experiments in circus format, several stations running at once across three or four labs. Each lab had about fifteen benches, with small groups of three or four teachers apiece. Teachers worked through an experiment, discussed it as a group once it finished, then rotated to the next station. Once one lab’s circuit was complete, the rotation continued to the next lab.

Nobody appointed a leader at each bench. One emerged anyway, every time. That’s simply what happens when a handful of capable people are given a real problem and left to get on with it. Each lab also had its own leader, someone who moved from bench to bench rather than staying fixed to one group. They checked in on how each discussion was going and fed anything urgent back to me directly.

Resetting equipment between rotations was an enormous amount of work for my lab techs and me. Keeping several simultaneous experiments running and properly stocked, repeatedly, across an entire week- that’s the part of the story nobody sees. The teachers experienced a single afternoon’s rotation. We reset the whole thing behind them, over and over, for five days straight.

The Right Answer Didn’t Come From Science

One afternoon I was walking past a bench on my way to have a quick word with the adviser. I overheard a group stuck on something. They had a piece of apparatus hanging from a length of string, and partway through the experiment the string kept unwinding. It was throwing off their results. They were still working out how to fix it when I stopped.

Before I worked in schools, I’d been an electronics wireman. I built wiring harnesses held together with lacing cord, a nylon cord with a rubberised coating that doesn’t unwind under tension. I happened to have some in stock, left over from reworking Victorian equipment for other schools taking kit from the closing building. It was safe to pass on. I suggested it for their string problem. It solved it outright. These days, cable ties do that same job in a wiring harness, but back then, lacing cord was exactly what a wobbling piece of suspended apparatus needed too.

Why the Structure Mattered More Than the Chemistry

The actual science being critiqued mattered; obviously, that was the entire point of the exercise. But looking back, the structure is the part that’s stayed with me. Nobody designed it to be a mastermind. Nobody in that lab would have called it one. It was simply the most sensible way to get a room full of teachers through a genuine skills gap. Trying to personally retrain every one of them myself was never going to work at that scale.

That’s the thing about mastermind groups that I keep coming back to. They don’t need a name, a manifesto, or anyone in the room deciding “right, this is a mastermind now.” They just need a real problem, the right-sized group, and a structure that lets useful information move in more than one direction. A handful of people at a bench, a lab leader circulating between them, or three lab techs working out logistics before any of it starts. The shape holds at every size.

Looking back, I don’t remember much about the official training materials. I remember the conversations. I remember teachers solving problems together, lab technicians quietly keeping everything moving, and expertise turning up from places nobody expected. That’s what stayed with me. Years later, I realised I’d spent a week watching mastermind groups form without any of us calling them that.

If you want the fuller story of how I built my own mastermind group from scratch, I’ve written about that elsewhere on this site. The practical guide to running one that lasts is there too. Napoleon Hill wrote about the same underlying principle decades before any of us in that lab had heard of it.