This seems like a good study. I wonder if the difficulty of the 'Apollo team' to coordinate can be boiled down to simply too much ego and status-seeking. I imagine that high performers would have bigger egos as they invested a lot of effort in getting to where they are and this makes them stand their ground more firmly.

I've noticed on some projects with poor leaders and many high-ego status-oriented people on the team, that sometimes people reach consensus over bad ideas because those ideas represent a kind of middle-ground between two large egos... But the middle-ground idea might actually be worse than both ideas from which it is derived.

I tried hard to avoid this when I was a team lead; the trick I used was that I would often raise half-baked ideas and then quickly admit if someone put up a counter-argument which showed how it was not ideal or just plain wrong.

I was trying to show everyone that coming up with a bad idea doesn't make you a fool and it's OK to play around with ideas and that what matters is not idea creation, but idea selection.

You need to be really knowledgeable in your field for this approach to work though because there will often be someone on your team who will try to use any opportunity to make you look bad and so you always have to be a few steps ahead.

So sometimes I might present a naive idea intentionally just to spark a discussion and get people thinking and forming their own ideas but, in fact, I have a much more developed idea in my mind about where I think it's going to go; so maybe 90% of the time, I look like I'm thinking many steps ahead.

Then maybe 10% of the time, it goes in a completely unexpected direction and I genuinely change my mind and people are pleased with themselves that they could convince me.