A635.4.3.RB - Build a Tower, Build a Team

The Spaghetti Challenge activity is actually very familiar for me, as during my bachelor studies I was out in a team and tasked with this activity during my very fist Organizational Development course. Being in that course and doing this activity I can confidently say that I do agree with Tom Wujec’s analysis of why kindergartners perform better on the Spaghetti Challenge than MBA students. I agree that MBA or business students generally are looking to lead and find the best solutions to problems, while the kindergartners look at the challenge through a simplistic lens and learn by doing (Wujec, 2010). Another potential reason I think the kids may have performed better was simply because they focused on the objective, being the marshmallow, and worked their way out. In doing so even the smallest progress was accounted for because the marshmallow was present, while the MBA students built up to the marshmallow and were left with little to no time to focus on securing the marshmallow itself.

I believe that CEOs with an executive assistant perform better than a group of CEOs alone because there is some hierarchy and order to the situation where an executive assistant is present while the alternative with just CEOs makes for a great deal of jockeying for the leadership role. 

Watching the video and hearing the story of process aligned with the Spaghetti Challenge I could certainly leverage the findings in a process intervention workshop to showcase how even the teams that you think are the most effective can fail when it comes to actually accomplishing a task if the wrong (and potentially stale) process is applied over and over again. In my own career, I was lucky enough to be exposed to this learning earlier on, but it allows me to always be aware of potential stale approaches and focus on the objective at hand.  

Reference

Wujec, T. (2010). "Build a tower, build a team". Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower