Spaghetti Tower (Marshmallow Challenge)

The Marshmallow Challenge — Video

What can Kindergarteners teach us about working together effectively?

From The Design Challenge on Medium

Years ago I started doing the Design Challenge. First with IDEO clients and then as part of a lecture I started giving at universities more broadly. In 2006, I presented it on the main TED stage in Monterey (TED 2006 Design Challenge).

The Goal

Build the tallest possible structure in 20 minutes using the following:

The Epiphany

After running this with >2,000 people of various backgrounds, I had an epiphany.

The highest performing group of all — Kindergarteners — performed better than the worst performing group of all…

Business School students.

Why? The Kindergarteners don't spend 15 minutes deciding who is going to be CEO of Spaghetti Corporation. They immediately start building and learning. The reality is that most design problems include a huge amount of unknowns that need to be figured out and experimented with. Very few people have intrinsic knowledge about the structural properties of spaghetti. They know more about what it is like when dinner.

Many of the business school teams in aggregate had zero or near zero scores because they spent way too much time planning rather than diving in and learning by doing.

What makes some teams successful and others utterly fail?

Team success is about leaving your ego at the door, diving in with the wonder and selflessness of a kindergartener and sharing your vulnerability. The business school students were distracted by status transactions, wasting time in search of control and power rather than acting as a single team.

Lessons from the Design Challenge

• Building develops your intuitions about how process and materials are connected. You learn by doing, discovering problems you can't predict in advance.
• Simultaneous iteration allows you to see a lot of good ideas.
• Being first to market isn't always the best.
• Multiple iterations usually beats a commitment to making your first idea work. (An exception may be marriage, where it's better to minimize iteration)
• All projects have resource constraints; however you can often get additional resources… but you'll never get them if you don't ask.
• Exercises like this illustrate the value of deadlines. Encourage wild ideas: What if I tied to the ceiling?
• This applies to developing specs, learning an instrument and nearly everything else in life… not just design.

Featured in The Culture Code

Daniel Coyle interviewed me for his book and I love how he summarizes the key actions that drive successful groups:

Read an excerpt from The Culture Code →

"The result is hard to absorb because it feels like an illusion. We see smart, experienced business school students, and we find it difficult to imagine that they would combine to produce a poor performance. We see unsophisticated, inexperienced kindergartners, and we find it difficult to imagine that they would combine to produce a successful performance. But this illusion, like every illusion, happens because our instincts have led us to focus on the wrong details. We focus on what we can see — individual skills. But individual skills are not what matters. What matters is the interaction."
— Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code

The business school students appear to be collaborating, but in fact they are engaged in a process psychologists call status management. They are figuring out where they fit into the larger picture: Who is in charge? Is it okay to criticize someone's idea? What are the rules here? Their interactions appear smooth, but their underlying behavior is riddled with inefficiency, hesitation, and subtle competition. Instead of focusing on the task, they are navigating their uncertainty about one another. They spend so much time managing status that they fail to grasp the essence of the problem (the marshmallow is relatively heavy, and the spaghetti is hard to secure). As a result, their first efforts often collapse, and they run out of time.

The actions of the kindergartners appear disorganized on the surface. But when you view them as a single entity, their behavior is efficient and effective. They are not competing for status. They stand shoulder to shoulder and work energetically together. They move quickly, spotting problems and offering help. They experiment, take risks, and notice outcomes, which guides them toward effective solutions.

"The kindergartners succeed not because they are smarter but because they work together in a smarter way. They are tapping into a simple and powerful method in which a group of ordinary people can create a performance far beyond the sum of their parts."
— Daniel Coyle

Run Your Own Design Challenge

Team size is best with 4–5 people. Some thoughts:

1. Have one person record scores and one person with a tape measure reading out height trials for every 5 teams. Encourage trials after 10 mins. Read out the time and have a clock visible. At 18 mins ask the groups if they want two more mins. They WILL say yes! Then shut it all down.
2. Prepare all the materials in advance and put the masking tape on the table in the room prior to people coming to the room. I like giving teams a few sheets of paper and pens to plan. The best teams usually don't sketch or plan…
3. Don't announce the exercise in advance — no warning is better for participants to get the full value of the exercise.
4. Many teams will game it by trying to tie to the ceiling or use paper, pens etc. as materials. Praise them for thinking out of the box but don't allow any actions that give a team an unfair advantage.
5. Explain in the beginning that measurements are only valid if freestanding and not sagging for 3 seconds.
6. I like giving awards for most creative failure (rubber chicken) and a spaghetti dinner kit (with wine too if adults!) to the highest scoring team.
7. After time has elapsed, go through the presentation and have a group discussion about team dynamics, listening, iterative value, working with the introverts and leveraging their talent etc.

Open Source Resources

A Note on the History of the Design Challenge

While at IDEO, Dennis Boyle (one of the great benefactors of my career that I am forever indebted to), Christine Kurjan and I started introducing The Design Challenge into corporate "Design Thinking" training sessions as part of the "IDEO University" curriculum we created together. Honestly, I don't remember exactly how the first rev of it came about but it evolved over a few years especially when I began doing the exercise at scale.

I lectured and ran the exercise at Stanford, the University of California, Santa Clara University, Aalto University in Helsinki, IMD Business School in Lausanne, The University of Tokyo, and with teams at Steelcase, HTC (with CEO Peter Chou) and others.

In 2006, I presented this at TED in Monterey (right in between Bert Rutan and Al Gore presenting An Inconvenient Truth… It was great sitting with them!). In 2010, my friend Tom Wujec took this to another level and built a business with it helping companies innovate. He even presented several of my original slides including the Kindergarteners that I freely gave to him. Amazingly, TED posted only his presentation which I always thought was bogus but mine is available on YouTube and Vimeo and is included in the original 2006 CD-Rom set. I fully support Tom here and he does credit me.

* I did have a few classes of Architecture students (notably at The University of California, Berkeley) that had high scores topping over 36" and nearly every team built impressive towers. Architectural students already have a built-in domain knowledge.

Credit for the key thesis illustration: Dennis Boyle