On Monday, when we were at IDC, we all had to do this Marshmallow Challenge. Here, we had to split into teams and spend the next 40 minutes trying to construct a tower out of spaghetti and string, with the marshmallow all the way on top.
Guest Blogger: Ben is a sophomore at Washington University
My group failed to keep our tower stable, but fortunately, most of the other groups failed as well, despite the large time gap we were given to plan out a structure. But after the event, we saw a TED Talk about this and learned that the Marshmallow Challenge was tested among other business students and among Fortune 50 CEO’s, and they mostly failed as well.
It turned out that when kindergarteners had to do this, they all actually got the job done quickly, simply because they kept the marshmallow on top the entire time instead of focusing on building the biggest tower.
The big takeaway I got from this challenge was that it represented the big, long-term goals for CEOs and their companies, with the marshmallow representing the company’s success or core competency or something, and if these companies really wanted to succeed, they should make their “marshmallow” the main focus, the thing they strive to push to the top. It also really helped me learn that for company projects, it wasn’t about how much money or effort I had to put in to outdo everyone else, but how much I kept the main goal of the project in focus.
Being in one of the groups that failed to make a stable structure, it was frustrating to make the tower stable. After all, we were all told that whichever group ended up with the marshmallow in the highest position would win, so we definitely had some incentive to achieve. But seeing as our group failed because we tried too hard to build the tallest possible spaghetti tower, we ignored the marshmallow, deciding to save it for last when the entire tower was finished. Yet since we couldn’t keep our tower stable as we brought it higher, we never even got a chance to use our marshmallow, since we were focused on the building development but not so much on the final structure and what we wanted out of it.
Learning how all those kindergarteners successfully built marshmallow towers, it shaped my long-term view on group projects and on how to pitch business ideas. I learned that big projects will fail if I focus too much on the product process but lose sight of the final product.
Going forward, I will use this experience with the Marshmallow Challenge to ignore the competition and just focus on developing a good product, instead of going through a sophisticated development process just to outdo everyone else. More importantly, this activity is going to help me succeed in the business world, which will involve a lot of networking and group work. I can share with others what I learned from this activity about making the final product the main focus during the process, rather than the process itself. This will encourage better product development and centralized group thinking, and help myself and my colleagues succeed with our product.
