"Something that could never, ever possibly destroy us..."

I came across an interesting fact the other day.  Apparently, the city of Ligonier, Indiana (a small town in the Northeastern corner of Indiana with a population of just over 4,400 people in the 2010 Census) is the marshmallow capital of the world!  I know what you are thinking - and the answer is no, I don't have all that much spare time!  I was trying to research the "Marshmallow Spaghetti Tower Challenge".  My wife is a middle school math teacher, and every year she asks her students to form into teams to see how high they can build a tower out of marshmallows, raw spaghetti, string, and tape.

Marshmallows absolutely fascinate me.  They actually come from plants (Althaea officinalis, a plant that is found in the marshy areas of Europe and western Asia) and were first made by the ancient Egyptians around 2000 BC.  The Egyptians revered the tasty treats and generally reserved them only for the pharaohs and the gods.  Marshmallows were once used by physicians to treat sore throat, cough, and wounds.  The 16th century English philosopher Francis Bacon once said, "Life is a marshmallow, easy to chew but hard to swallow."  The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man was the villain at the end of the 1984 film Ghostbusters (Dan Akroyd's character Ray chose the marshmallow man, because he thought it was "something that could never, ever possibly destroy us").  All of us know marshmallows as one of the three ingredients for the summer treat S'mores (the other two being graham crackers and chocolate).  

Marshmallows have been the subject of at least one other famous study in psychology (conducted by Walter Mischel and Ebbe Ebbesen), known as the "Stanford Marshmallow Experiment", which I have posted about more than once in the past.  Today, I want to revisit my wife's classroom and talk about the "Marshmallow Spaghetti Tower Test".  Basically, as I mentioned above, the challenge is to see how high a team of students can build a tower from several pieces of raw spaghetti, string, tape, and marshmallows (they only have twenty minutes to build their tower).  Scott Anthony wrote about this unique challenge in a Harvard Business Review article from a few years ago ("Innovation Leadership Lessons from the Marshmallow Challenge"), and Tom Wujec talked about his experience using the challenge with business executives in a short TED talk ("Build a tower, build a team").

As I mentioned, my wife uses this challenge in her classroom every year.  I am fascinated by what she has found year after year - the students in the lower grades frequently outperform the students in the upper grades!  In addition, she has also found that the advanced classes don't do as well as the regular classes.  She tells me, "The older and advanced classes waste a lot of time trying to plan out the steps that they will take before getting started, while the younger and regular classes jump right in and learn by trial-and-error."  

It also seems that the older and more advanced classes go through Bruce Tuckman's classic stages of group formation ("forming, storming, norming, and performing").  Tom Wujec talks about his experience with this challenge in his TED talk.  He consistently finds that kindergarteners outperform business school students and lawyers!  Check out the figure below:

Similar to what my wife's experience, Wujec finds that the business school students spend a lot of timing trying to identify the group leader (with students frequently jockeying for position), going through the stages of group formation, and planning out in detail what they are going to do in order to construct their tower.  Conversely, the kindergarteners just proceed and learn by trial-and-error.

Does my wife's and Wujec's experience suggest that kindergarteners are more creative than business school students?  As Scott Anthony writes, "It's hard to escape the conclusion that we all begin with creativity and curiosity, which too many of us systematically unlearn as we go through the education system and scale up the corporate ladder."  The best way to drive innovation and creativity may be to adopt a "beginner's mind-set" and continue to foster curiosity by continuously challenging yourself with new things and new experiences.

It's also interesting that Wujec's teams comprised of CEO's and Executive Administrators outperform the kindergarteners, perhaps indicating that "innovation happens most often when different mind-sets and skills collide."  Here the lesson is to diversify your personal and professional networks.  Studies consistently find that diverse teams, particularly ones where everyone on the team feels empowered to contribute, identify creative and innovative solutions and ideas.  It may also help to ask a few kindergarteners how they would tackle a problem!

Scott Anthony concludes his article with the following point.  "It's reasonable to assume that leaders will confront more, not less, ambiguity in the future.  The best way to prepare is to seek every opportunity to plunge into chaos and radically diversify your innovation network."