"We found that teams that achieved success were
fundamentally assembled in the same way, by bringing in some
experienced people who had not worked together before. The unsuccessful
teams repeated the same collaborations over and over again."

So we have got some things right:  this team hasn’t worked together on our current problems and in our current configuration, and there is a useful mix of backgrounds and perspectives.  On the channels work we are about to get an influx of completely new people, which will be healthy too.

What we haven’t got is any systematic way of engaging with the hunt for new thinking – in approach and style as well as content – to be found in the world beyond our boundaries.  So the challenge is, what do we need to add to the plans to give us confidence that we will be able to do that – and that we will be able to reinforce our arguments and assertions with broadly based evidence?

The research from which the quotation at the top comes rather bizarrely examines successful teams in the two closely related disciplines of Broadway musicals and research papers in academic journals.

"If your systemic network has teams with only incumbents, and
especially incumbents who have worked together repeatedly, your field
tends to have low impact scores. The fact that we found this across
fields with equally powerful minds suggests that how the brain power of
a field is organized into different kinds of networks determines the
field’s success."