I simply loved Tom Wujec's TED talk about the Marshmallow Challenge. Tom borrowed the idea from Peter Skillman, VP of Design at Palm. If you have not heard of this activity it's pretty simple. Teams of four are given 18 minutes to build a free standing structure made of spaghetti, a yard of string, a yard of tape and a marshmallow. The challenge is that the marshmallow must be placed on top. The team wins by creating the tallest structure. Tom ran this game experiment on Fortune 500 CEOs, engineers and architects, kinder-gardeners, and business school grads. He had some pretty amazing discoveries about how people collaborate.
Business school grads performed the worse. Why you ask? They are taught to find and execute the correct solution. CEOs did so so. Architects did great (thank god!) Amazingly kindergartners who practice iteration, did the best. They would iterate through the prototype and refine their process. This is very similar to something a startup would do. The little kids would build, see if it works, and repeat until they found a structure which would stand by itself. Most of the time they built the tallest structure! Iterate and you might get the best solution!
Tom also tried to incentivize the teams with money. What do you think happened? Horrible performance! Why you ask? Have you watched this Dan Raskin video on why bonuses kill motivation? If not - do so. It'll change how you inspire people around you.
"Every project has it's own marshmallow" Tom says. "Design is truly a contact sport, it demands that we apply the very best of all of our senses for the task. Take a look at this short video of the talk below.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment