Great Teams Are a Mix of Old and New

The best teams, we tend to think, are like a band of brothers. They’ve been together for a long time. They know each other extremely well. And they are more successful as a result. It’s common sense, right? Well, it turns out that great teams — the most creative, the most innovative — are more temporary in nature that you’d think. Take Broadway. The best productions, researchers have found, are made up of rag-tag groups — a mix of old and new faces. The old faces bring knowledge of the best processes and the best working methods, and the new folks bring a fresh creative spirit to the table. The most innovative companies work in similar ways, too. Ad-hoc teams form around a given project, then disband. But it’s not so easy pull off — in order for this to work, the entire organization has to be diverse enough in order to make temporary teams a reality.