In keeping with the idea that kids are natural-born designers (as discussed in this previous post), recently came across the "Build a Tower, Build a Team" TED lecture featuring Tom Wujec of Autodesk. In the video, Wujec talks about “the marshmallow challenge”—an exercise that has also been discussed by Palm’s VP of design, Peter Skillman. The idea is this: You take a bunch of sticks of uncooked spaghetti, tape, string and a marshmallow. You give these ingredients to a team of four people and challenge them (within a time limit) to build the tallest freestanding structure they can, finishing with the marshmallow on top.

 

Here’s the interesting part: In his marshmallow challenge workshops, Wujec sometimes pits MBA students against kindergartners—and guess who wins?The business school grads tend to do too much talking, advance planning, and jockeying for power within the group. I'd imagine students of online MBA programs would do the same. They also usually wait until the last minute to put the marshmallow on top of their tower—and invariably the whole thing collapses. As Wujec explains, “Business students are trained to focus on and find the single right plan—and then when it doesn’t work, they’re in trouble.”

 

But kids do it differently. Instead of talking, they start building right away. And they quickly test their ideas as they go—by constantly putting the marshmallow on top to see if the structure can support it. In other words, they do prototyping—which provides them with instant feedback about what works and what doesn’t. They also usually do a better job of collaborating with each other, because, as Wujec says, nobody’s vying to be the CEO of the group.

 

Here’s the 7-minute TED video of Wujec discussing the Challenge and its interesting outcomes, including the fact that if you add an executive assistant into the CEO group, that group does a lot better.