Another marshmallow challenge

Here is your list of supplies:

20 sticks of spaghetti (uncooked)

1 yard of string

1 roll of tape

1 marshmallow

Here is your task.  Use the supplies above to build a free-standing structure that will support the weight of the marshmallow on top.  You have 18 minutes to finish.  Any questions?  Ready?  Go.

How did you do?  If you want some background information, check out the TED talk by Tom Wujec.  Also check out the Harvard Business Review article by Scott Anthony.  Don't feel too bad if your structure wasn't very tall or even if it failed to hold up the weight of the marshmallow.  You are in good company - most business school students do quite poorly.  As a matter of fact, most business school students do worse than students in kindergarten!

Most business school students spend the first few minutes trying to figure out who is going to be in charge - who's going to lead the rest of the team.  After the students identify the leader, the group typically will spend the next few minutes on planning.  Everyone contributes their opinion on how best to accomplish the task.  Finally, after a little over 10 minutes, the group starts to build.  Someone waits until about a minute is left on the clock to place the marshmallow on the top of the structure.  On average, the business students build a structure that is about 10 inches tall.  Most of the time, the structure collapses once the marshmallow is placed on top.

What happens in the kindergarten class?  The kindergarten students don't waste any time trying to figure out who is the leader, nor do they plan ahead.  They just do it.  If they fail, they try something else.  Not only is the structure usually taller - several inches taller in fact (on average, about 25 inches) - but the marshmallow usually stays on top of the structure!

Okay - it would be really poetic if I told you something like, "We are all born with creativity, but as we go through school and/or start to work, our creativity gets drummed out of us."  That's probably not what happens.  As it turns out, architects and engineers do better than the kindergarten students (that makes sense).  CEO's tend to do better than the kindergarten students too.  Perhaps individuals who are destined to become CEO's are naturally creative. 

Here is the really cool point.  CEO's and their executive administrators usually do the best of all.  They even perform better than the architects and engineers.  These results are consistent with nearly every other similar research study.  Diverse teams outperform everyone else!  Perhaps that's why the kindergarten students perform well too.

Here's a short video of students participating in the marshmallow challenge.  It's amazing to me that we are reminded, over and over again, that everything we learned in kindergarten is still relevant when we are old and gray!