The challenge, if you don’t know it, is a fun and instructive design exercise that encourages teams to experience simple but profound lessons in collaboration, innovation and creativity.
The challenge seems simple enough: small teams have to build a structure in 15 minutes using 20 sticks of spaghetti, 1 yard of tape, 1 yard of string and 1 marshmallow.
The winning team is the one that can construct the tallest freestanding structure with the marshmallow on top within the time allowed. The point of the exercise is to collaborate very quickly in order to respond to the task. It reveals some surprising lessons about the nature of collaboration.
I had the honor of being invited to two very large all team meetings in 2019 to facilitate the Marshmallow Challenge.
The Middle & Small Group Business Segment
In May 2019, I was the closing speaker for the Middle & Small Group business segment All Team meeting.
All people have a unique combination of talents, knowledge and skills — strengths — that they use in their daily lives to do their work, achieve their goals and interact with others.
Gallup has found that when people understand and apply their strengths, the effect on their lives and work is transformational. People who use their strengths every day are six times more likely to be engaged in their work and three times more likely to say they have an excellent quality of life. Here are the four quadrants within StrengthsFinder. This online assessment goes through 34 strengths to tell you what your top five are or your Signature Strengths.
For this team, completing StrengthsFinder and understanding Force-Power combined with the learnings from the Marshmallow Challenge resulted in a fun day as well as an energized and very self-aware team unleashing their achievement drive for the greater good. How cool is that? Here’s the middle and small group business in action at their Marshmallow Challenge!!!
Strategy & Public Affairs Division
In August 2019, I was the closing speaker for the Strategy and Public Affairs division All Team meeting. The theme of this all team meeting was INNOVATION so The Marshmallow Challenge is a perfect fit.
Four things I shared regarding innovation with this very large (over one hundred) and very engaged group before the marshmallow challenge
1. My best definition of innovation
2. The three stage it passes through – just like the three
stages of the truth
3. Peter Drucker is one of my favorites and it is important
to understand the prominence he places on innovation
4. Finally, you can’t innovate if you don’t collaborate and
these are the five steps we pace ourselves through in my
individual business unit
Here is that Strategy & Public Affairs group embracing the challenge!!!
Look at them getting after it.
WAY TO BRING IT!!!
ARE WE SMARTER THAN A GROUP OF KINDERGARTENERS???
After our build process in each team’s marshmallow challenge we watched the 7 minute TED Talk from Tom Wujec: Build a tower, build a team.
Here’s the BUILD A TOWER, BUILD A TEAM TED Talk. It is a great 7 minutes. Enjoy this and consider your own Marshmallow Challenge. I am happy to help or it would be an honor to facilitate for you.
Terry Burke
313-498-7587
TBurke@WorkByTerryBurke.com
Click on the Triangle in lower left to launch the video (Not the Big Triangle in the White Circle! – weird, huh?)
As we learn in the TED TALK, Build a Tower, Build a Team, it turns out that Kindergarten teams perform the best on the challenge – bottom line is that they continuously prototype, are overwhelmingly curious and aren’t interested in trying to position for power and control. The best teams and the most innovative groups are like kindergarteners.
Follow-up questions to ask of the group to facilitate discussion and further learning:
• Was there a leader on your team? Who was it and who decided who the leader would be?
• If you had no leader, do you think having designated someone a leader would have helped?
• If you had a leader, how did he/she do? Of the leadership practices we have learned so far, which did your leader use?
• How helpful was everyone on your team in challenging the process of building the tallest structure? Did anyone appear to be an expert?
• Did any team members tune out of the activity — out of frustration with other members or for some other reason? What could you have done to keep all members of the group fully engaged?
• Did you feel everyone’s ideas were well received during the activity?
• How did you feel as the time limit was approaching? Did pressure increase? If yes, was that helpful or not?
• In retrospect, what could you have done better to enhance your ability to Challenge the Process (one of the five leadership tenets from Kouzes and Possners Leadership Challenge)?
• Did you practice outsight? Where might new ideas have come from given your time constraint?
• Did you celebrate small wins? If yes, how did you do this?Did you have FUN?
