Marshmallows and Kindergartners

The Marshmallow Challenge is an interesting leadership workshop exercise that highlights, to me, important concepts or preconceived notions and process facilitation. The challenge and a talk regarding it can be found here and Tom Wujec gives a really clear and concise overview of the subject. There are a series of questions that are posed regarding this talk and they are below:

1. Do you agree with Tom Wujec's analysis of why kindergartners perform better on the Spaghetti Challenge than MBA students?

I do to a certain extent. Wujec states that the kid prototype first and learn from their mistakes. He also states that kids are less concerned with leadership roles and finding out who is in charge of the group. They just get to the task at hand and go from there. I find that in my place of work we often do not concern ourselves with who is leading a group so much as we just focus on the task at hand. When we do start to get into who is leading a project it seems that less gets done as we get into a mode where we focused more on procedure and less on results. This is interesting for me as I tend to focus on procedure and how procedure impact effectiveness. The kindergartners don't have this problem... they just produce. 

I would like to add that the kindergartners don't have a pre-conceived notion of how something is supposed to operate. I think that as adults we have notion of how something is supposed to look and then try to make the process fit that vision (in this discussion vision refers to the final product and not the leadership trait of vision). We don't question if the vision was the best vision possible until the vision turns out to not work. Even then we don't often question the vision itself but how we got there in the first place.

2. Can you think of any other reasons why kids might perform better?

The lack of fear of failure may also have something to do with why the kids perform better. Kids are happy to playing with spaghetti and marshmallows and they aren't concerned with what happens if the tower falls. In the adult world there are consequences for things that fail but they aren't always as drastic as they seem as first. Elon Musk's SpaceX rocket exploded when a first landing was attempted and it is rather spectacular to watch but SpaceX didn't pack up shop and called it a day, they went back and they learned from it and nailed a subsequent landing. Failure didn't stop Musk from completing his project anymore than the kids were concerned if their towers fell over. To be sure an exploding rocket is an expensive failure but it didn't stop them from trying again. There is a lesson to be learned from accepting failure as a possibility. Personally I'd be leery of anyone that never failed at something...how much could they really be trying?

3. In your view, why do CEOs with an executive assistant perform better than a group of CEOs alone?

This comes down to facilitation. Assistants are trained to keep a process moving and to provide relevant information. Additionally, good CEOs know that their assistants know what they are doing and they learn to listen to them. A leader is only as good as the information he or she has and how well they process that information. We live in an information age and assistants make sense of that information and present it is easily digestible chunks. Additionally good assistants learn to work with personalities, they know how to manage people and keep them task focused. This adds a valuable dynamic to a group. 

4. If you were asked to facilitate a process intervention workshop, how could you relate the video to process intervention skills?

The process is almost as important as the result in my opinion. I think there is tendency to work backwards from where you want to be instead of seeing where your process takes you. Leadership is a bit more complex than stacking spaghetti but the underlying trust of process remains the same. If a process isn't getting the result you need maybe the result isn't where you need to be. Of course, the process could be also be faulty and both need to be examined but I would argue that the process is the more important of the two. Learn to trust failure as a teacher. It takes trail and error to get a process correct. However, if the process is good and the results are not what you wanted maybe take a look and see if the goal was realistic in the first place. 

5. What can you take away from this exercise to immediately use in your career?

Learn to trust the process. One of my weaknesses is that I do focus on the process and tend to tinker with it. Not every process is a good process but conversely not every process is a bad process. There is a tendency when focusing on change that we need to go in a change all sorts of things. The adage "if it ain't broke don't fix it" can still hold true. Determining which is which is the tricky part. 

Process and results are a type of symbiotic relationship, you can't have a result without a process and without a needed result you don't need a way of getting there. The two go hand in hand and as I tend to believe the process is the more important of the two that is where I focus my efforts. However, there is a danger in over-analyzing the process and neglecting if my desired results were realistic. The kids produced better towers because they didn't concern themselves with figuring out all the variables and assigning tasks, they just built the tower and learned from mistakes. This is pure process improvement and validates my stance that processes are important but I'd be willing to bet there was one person that wondered why we needed to put marshmallows on spaghetti in the first place. That person is handy to have around at times.