In less than seven minutes, you
can learn, what Tom Wujec calls “very deep lessons about collaboration” (Wujec,
2010, n.p.). Imagine the scenario, you and three other team members are grouped
together at a conference and are issued a challenge. A paper bag is handed out
to your team, as well as other teams of four, are in competition. The
instructions are simple, build the tallest freestanding structure with the
contents in the bag in eighteen minutes. As you shake loose the tools from your
bag you find twenty pieces of uncooked spaghetti, one yard of masking tape, one
yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow must go on top of the
structure.
The Marshmallow Challenge (you
can review the comprehensive rules at http://marshmallowchallenge.com)
“forces people to collaborate quickly” and many go about it in a patterned,
predictable way that can be charted (Wujec, 2010, n.p.). Once the challenge is
introduced the team talks about it, often members jockey for power, which is
followed by a planning stage, a building process, and at the end as time draws
to a close in the last few moments you arrive at the make it or break it
moment, the big finale. This may end in glory while all marvel at your
engineering wonder. It may also collapse along with your team’s dream of
success. Apparently there are a lot of oh-oh moments.
Tom Wujec said he has done this
with over seventy groups. Surprisingly there is a clear classification of which
groups of people perform better and who perform the worst. The worst performers
are recent business school graduates. A terrific punchline to this fact is that
kindergarteners are one of the best performing groups, far superior to the
MBAs. Kindergartners do better with this challenge, really? Why?
As I am also in pursuit of being
a “business school graduate”, this is curiously alarming news. Apparently the
children do better because no one is lobbying to be the CEO of Spaghetti, Inc.,
as Wujec offers. The business school students are trained to find the single,
best way and spend a long time planning, quickly build the structure since time
is running out and put the marshmallow on the top at the end. At this point you
are either right or you are not. If you are not, you are about to have a game
of twenty piece spaghetti pick up all over the table. On the other hand, the
children start with the marshmallow and prototype with it until they are
satisfied with their structure. It is an interesting view into how the two
groups look at the task at hand and approach it.
I can see this making sense for a
number of reasons. When we are younger there is a sense of freedom from the
things that we learn to value as we transition into our adult lives. When we
are young, we are not concerned with the nuances of failure, do not base self
worth on a single task, nor embrace winning as a part of our identities. This
is something we are taught over time. Children seem to think as they do. If
something is going wrong they turn around and try again. Adults have to think
and analyze to the point of delay. While there are more wonderful merits of
critical thinking than shortcomings, trying to get it perfect by primarily
planning and never making an attempt allows us to get in our own way in a
challenge like this. Theory needs to be applied practically and then adjusted,
thinking critically through what you just discovered in the trial run. Sometimes
there is only one time to get it right, but are we conditioned to believe this
is the case in every task we do?
As a child I had limitless
imagination and was full of creativity. I remember having a difficult time
transitioning because assignments were not interpretive and carefree after a
certain age. There became a right way and a wrong way to do things. Children
are not naturally afraid of the word no, but adults take it more seriously. Ten
year old Casey could make a vivid, colorful landscape drawing. A Technicolor paradise
with a purple sun and teal grass created for the purpose of wishing to go to a
unique place. If you handed me a coloring page today, I have become so rigid
with order and procedure it would be difficult for me not to make the picture
are literal as possible. I feel that during the quest for uniform understanding
of how we relate, it calls for precise language and symbolism so that we can
easily communicate as a society. This also washes away imagination in order to
implement sameness.
Interestingly, a group of CEOs do
not perform as well as they would if an executive assistant is on the team.
This is another punchline that happens to be true, too. In my view I see it as
though there are ten CEOs, for example, that is ten types of people that
generally know how to do one job, the same job. If you have ten people and one
is an executive assistant, now you have representatives from two types of
backgrounds or two pieces of the puzzle. Wujec also points out that they pay
attention to the work, they understand the processes and have specialized
skills in facilitation. I believe that CEOs are not the observers or gathers of
information. They are presented the information and use their expert opinions
to make decisions. If you could negotiate with the spaghetti or rally its
support, perhaps then the CEOs would have a better chance going it alone
without administrative assistance. Alas, I have never heard of a spaghetti
whisperer.
This is an eye-opening, effective
way to show work teams how they operate and relate to each other as a team. This
would be a terrific challenge to use if I were facilitating a process
intervention. I would also like to try out something a little different, too. I
could be the mad scientist of social experimentation in the name of process
intervention. I like to shake things up and see what comes about. While the
brain juices are flowing from the marshmallow challenge I would like to give
everyone five minutes to draw those throwback landscape pictures of my yesteryear
for giggles to see if anyone made my purple sun. If my conjecture is correct,
the trees, water, sky, and sun would be made their traditional colors. After
the drawings were complete I would like to point out how lovely they all were,
but that to innovate it is important to occasionally execute something that you
do not normally do, there are no rules on a coloring page, it is blank and open
to interpretation. We used to see this as children, but now it is usual to structure
everything from our adult points of view. To push beyond what we always do and to
improve any process or invent a better practice; being creative, including
feeling able to be creative together, should be a tool you are comfortable
pulling out of your back pocket from time to time. I would then ask the groups
to get back together, take the same page, and decide how to color the picture.
If for no other reason, this can show that process intervention is fun, but
also allows different methods in a safe environment. If needing new ideas is
needed in the group, this type of activity would allow the individuals and
group to learn to diagnose and solve their own problems.
Regardless the activity, though I
would love to try out the coloring contest, there are relatable connections to
process intervention. There are five areas that factor into group performance:
communication, member roles and functions, leadership and authority, group
norms and growth, and problem solving and decision making. To improve
performance, group building and maintenance functions allow positive behaviors
to help grow the member’s relationships (Brown, 2011). Harmonizing reduces
conflict, encouraging helps develop ideas, quiet members feel able to
contribute, and gatekeeping gives everyone a chance to be heard. More heads are
better than one; if you pull from everyone’s strengths, you will have strengths
you didn’t previously have within seconds of coming together. “A practitioner’s
process interventions should be as brief and crisp as possible and focus on
only one level of behavior at a time” (Brown, p. 203). There are many types of
process interventions that can be used such as: clarifying, summarizing, synthesizing,
probing, questioning, listening, reflecting feelings, providing support,
coaching, counseling, modeling, setting the agenda, feeding back observations,
and providing structural suggestions (Brown, 2011).
I love the marshmallow challenge
and really enjoyed watching this video because it reminded me not to lose parts
of myself, such as childlike wonder and the tenacity to keep going and
tinkering until something is improved. Quitting or not trying is far more
damaging to the task at hand than getting it wrong and working to fix it. This
encourages me to practice this in all aspects of my life and to show others to
do the same.
References:
Brown , D. (2011). An
experiential approach to organizational development. (8th ed.). New
Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Tom Wujec: Build a tower, build a
team | Video on TED.com. (February 2010). TED: Ideas worth spreading. Retrieved
September 30, 2014, from http://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower.html
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