Marshmallows and Spaghetti: How Kindergartners Think Like Lean Startups

As Wujec adds, every business challenge has its own "marshmallow," so consider bringing some kindergarten-minded people onto your startup team.

From running shoes to car seats, from buildings to smart phones, from blockbuster movies to MRI machines, we live in a world that somebody imagined, designed, and created.

The activity, known as the marshmallow challenge, was borrowed by Wujec from Peter Skillman, VP of Design at Palm. Small teams are given 18 minutes to build a free-standing structure made of dry spaghetti, one yard of string, one yard of tape and a marshmallow, which must be placed on top. The team wins by creating the tallest structure of all the groups participating. What Wujec discovered is that this simple game revealed some fascinating insights into how groups collaborate.

Wujec conducted a team building experiment with all types of people, from business execs to kindergartners, and the results he presented were surprising, to say the least.

Wujec has conducted this experiment with over 70 groups of "students and designers and architects, even the CTOs of the Fortune 50," he says. Most teams quickly break into roles and plan their structure, and then spend the remaining time building it before quickly and gingerly placing the marshmallow on top as time expires. More often than not, the structure pitifully fails as the marshmallow is added, leaving the team with a pile of spaghetti and no time to try again.

"Design truly is a contact sport. It demands that we bring all of our senses to the task, and that we apply the very best of our thinking, our feeling and our doing to the challenge that we have at hand." - Tom Wujec

Wujec says that business school grads are taught to seek out and execute the one correct solution their challenge, while kindergartners practice the iterative prototype and refine process, much like the methods of lean startups.  The kids would build, test and repeat until they found a structure that worked, and most times, he says, they built the tallest and most interesting structures.

What startups can take away from the marshmallow challenge is that bigger teams and higher incentives are no substitute for having the right skills and the right process in place. Wujec found that larger teams performed increasing worse than smaller teams, and incentivizing them with a reward did not make up for the fact that they were not using the right process.