At a recent faculty meeting Lipscomb
Academy Elementary School teachers were challenged to build a freestanding structure
using 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string and one
marshmallow in 18 minutes. And the marshmallow had to be on the top.
The man
behind this exercise is Tom Wujec, a Fellow at Autodesk, the legendary makers
of AutoCAD design software. He’s also the author of Five-Star
Mind: Games and Puzzles to Stimulate Your Creativity and Imagination.
Back in 2010 he gave a fascinating TED
Talk. (http://marshmallowchallenge.
In the video, Wujec says,
In the video, Wujec says,
“There’s something about this exercise
that reveals very deep lessons about the nature of collaboration.” Having
performed the exercise with more than 70 groups – including groups at Fortune 50 companies – Wujec has reached a few
conclusions:
1. Recent business school graduates perform poorly. “They lie, they would cheat, they get
distracted, and they produce really lame structures,” he says. The average
tower by all participants in the exercise is 20 inches; the average tower by
b-school grads is only 10 inches.
2. Recent graduates of kindergarten perform well. The average tower by kindergarten
graduates measures 26 inches. “Not only do they produce the tallest structures
but the most interesting structures of them all,” he reports. Why is that? “none
of the kids spends any time trying to be CEO of Spaghetti, Inc.” says Wujec. In
an exercise with an 18-minute limit, such jockeying for positions is wasted
time.
B-school graduates tend to wait until the
end of the 18 minutes to add the marshmallow to the top of their structures.
When the structures collapse, the b-school teams enter something like a crisis
mode. The kindergarten grads, by contrast, tend to incorporate the marshmallow
into their designs early on, averting last-second crises.
The difference between success and failure
was not intelligence or age or even experience, but the willingness to work collaboratively,
take risks and be open to creative solutions.
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