The rules fit on a sticky note. Teams of four get 20 sticks of dry spaghetti, a yard of tape, a yard of string and one marshmallow. They have to build the tallest structure that stands on its own, with the marshmallow on top. The challenge’s website recommends 18 minutes.
The designer Peter Skillman came up with it. Tom Wujec, who builds tools for design teams, picked it up and ran it in about 70 workshops around the world, with students, designers, architects, even the chief technology officers of Fortune 50 companies. In a TED talk in 2010, he described how it usually goes.
Most teams begin by talking about the task and jockeying for who’s in charge. Then they plan, sketch and lay out spaghetti. They spend most of their time building one ever-growing structure. Just as time runs out, someone takes out the marshmallow and places it gently on top, and everyone steps back to admire it.
Then the weight of the marshmallow brings the whole thing down. “The ‘ta-da’ turns into an ‘uh-oh,’” Wujec said.
Among the worst, he found, were recent graduates of business school. Among the best were recent graduates of kindergarten. The average team in his workshops reached about 20 inches. Business-school students reached about half that. The kindergarteners did better than most adults.
The best of all were architects and engineers, who know that triangles hold their shape. The tallest structure he had seen was 39 inches.
What the children did differently, Wujec said, was start with the marshmallow. They built a small tower with the marshmallow on top, then another, and another. Each version showed them what held and what didn’t. The business students, he said, were trained “to find the single right plan,” and then execute it.
Then Wujec raised the stakes. For one group of design students, he offered a prize of $10,000 worth of software to the winning team. A one-inch structure would have won it.
Not one team had a structure left standing.
He ran the challenge again with the same students. This time they knew to build and test early. They went from the very worst to among the very best, with the tallest structures in the least time.