Since Gersick obtained results she didn’t expect, and since those results ran counter to the prevailing view, she searched for a way to understand them. “The paradigm through which I came to interpret the findings resembles a relatively new concept from the field of natural history that has not heretofore been applied to groups: punctuated equilibrium,” she wrote. Like those trilobites and snails, teams of human beings working together didn’t progress gradually. They experienced extended periods of inertia—interrupted by swift bursts of activity. But in the case of humans, whose time horizons
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