Jonny Wilkinson believes Warren Gatland should hold off on selecting his British and Irish Lions Test captain until the week of the first Test in Auckland on June 24.
The captaincy has been the subject of much speculation in recent weeks with Sam Warburton, Alun Wyn Jones and Owen Farrell the frontrunners to be awarded the honour for the three-Test series against New Zealand.
With the squad due to be named on April 19, Gatland will soon have to make a decision on the captaincy.
But Wilkinson has urged Gatland to name a tour captain and appoint a leadership group, before then settling on a Test captain once the squad have come through the bulk of the six matches they will play prior to the first Test at Eden Park.
"Ultimately, every player on that tour needs to be functioning somewhere near the level of captain in order to come back with victories," Wilkinson told Sky Sports News HQ.
"In an ideal world, you want your captain on the field where the action is for as much as possible but at the same time, as I have gotten older, I am a firm believer that no position should ever be pencilled in.
"It is not until the week before the first game that you should know your team.
"If you have made up your team now then you are judging it on the basis of a different environment to the one you are going to play in.
"You need to get out there to understand that and that is why this is so, so difficult.
"I think maybe having three or four guys in there that you know can take the role of captain. You then have a tour captain maybe. You know then that of those three or four guys, however many of them end up in the team, they are capable of doing that job.
"You cannot go out there with this idea that you have one captain. You can have one captain who is named captain but you will need another leadership group of five or six who have the same inspirational effect and are treated as captains also."
Wilkinson is well aware of the difficult challenge the Lions will face in New Zealand, having been a part of Clive Woodward's squad in 2005 which were hammered in all three Tests.
The former England fly-half feels there was a sense of disunity which caused the Lions to unravel on that Tour and warned the current players not to repeat those mistakes.
Wilkinson explained: "If there is anything not quite aligned in the way that you are training, in the spirit of the guys or wherever your mind-set is - if there is something that is not aligned perfectly, it will get absolutely torn apart on the field.
"That is what happened on that Lions tour and it didn't take that long because there were those divisions.
"This year, it just needs to be enormously tight - much tighter than New Zealand. The Lions need to come together for this one-off, amazing event. New Zealand have been together for years and years. Those will be the two journeys that collide.
"The Lions have to draw inspiration from the fact this is six weeks of just one dream and one goal and it is never to be lived again."