The Design Challenge (also called Spaghetti Tower):
What can Kindergarteners teach us about working together effectively?
Years ago I started doing the Design Challenge. First with IDEO clients and then as part of a lecture I started giving at universities more broadly. In 2006, I presented it on the main TED stage in Monterey (TED 2006 Design Challenge).
The goal: Build the tallest possible structure in 20 minutes using the following:
· Twenty pieces of uncooked spaghetti (not Vermicelli by the way!)
· One meter of masking tape
· One meter of string
· One standard-size marshmallow
Rule: You measure from the table to the top of the marshmallow and the structure has to remain motionless without support for 3 seconds for the measurement to count.
After running this with >2000 people of various backgrounds, I had an epiphany.
The highest performing group of all — Kindergarteners*, performed better than the worst preforming group of all…
Business School students.
Why? The Kindergarteners don’t spend 15 minutes deciding who is going to be CEO of Spaghetti Corporation. They immediately start building and learning. The reality is that most design problems include a huge amount of unknowns that need to be figured out and experimented with. Very few people have intrinsic knowledge about the structural properties of spaghetti. They know more about what it is like when dinner. Many of the business school teams in aggregate had zero or near zero scores because they spent way to much time planning rather than diving in and learning by doing.
The Design Challenge is a tool to teach the value of iteration but uncovered a much more valuable lesson.
What makes some teams successful and others utterly fail?
Team success is about leaving your ego at the door, diving in with the wonder and selflessness of a kindergartener and sharing your vulnerability. The business school students were distracted by status transactions, wasting time in search of control and power rather than acting as a single team.
Lessons for the Design Challenge:
· Building develops your intuitions about how process and materials are connected. You learn by doing, discovering problems you can’t predict in advance.
· Simultaneous iteration allows you to see a lot of good ideas.
· Being first to market isn’t always the best.
· Multiple iterations usually beats a commitment making your first idea work. (An exception may be marriage, where it’s better to minimize iteration)
· All projects have resource constraints; however you can often get additional resources… but you’ll never get them if you don’t ask.
· Exercises like this illustrate the value of deadlines. Encourage wild ideas: What if I tied to the ceiling?
· This applies to developing specs, learning an instrument and nearly everything else in life…not just design.
The key thesis illustrated:
Spaghetti Tower featured in Culture Code
http://danielcoyle.com/excerpt-culture-code/
Daniel interviewed me for his book and I love how he summarizes the key actions that drive successful groups:
· Build Safety: Create signals of connection and generate bonds of belonging and identity.
· Share Vulnerability: Habits of mutual risk drive trusting cooperation.
· Establish Purpose: Narratives create shared goals and values.
As described by Daniel Coyle:
The result is hard to absorb because it feels like an illusion. We see smart, experienced business school students, and we find it difficult to imagine that they would combine to produce a poor performance. We see unsophisticated, inexperienced kindergartners, and we find it difficult to imagine that they would combine to produce a successful performance. But this illusion, like every illusion, happens because our instincts have led us to focus on the wrong details. We focus on what we can see — individual skills. But individual skills are not what matters. What matters is the interaction.
The business school students appear to be collaborating, but in fact they are engaged in a process psychologists call status management. They are figuring out where they fit into the larger picture: Who is in charge? Is it okay to criticize someone’s idea? What are the rules here? Their interactions appear smooth, but their underlying behavior is riddled with inefficiency, hesitation, and subtle competition. Instead of focusing on the task, they are navigating their uncertainty about one another. They spend so much time managing status that they fail to grasp the essence of the problem (the marshmallow is relatively heavy, and the spaghetti is hard to secure). As a result, their first efforts often collapse, and they run out of time.
The actions of the kindergartners appear disorganized on the surface. But when you view them as a single entity, their behavior is efficient and effective. They are not competing for status. They stand shoulder to shoulder and work energetically together. They move quickly, spotting problems and offering help. They experiment, take risks, and notice outcomes, which guides them toward effective solutions.
The kindergartners succeed not because they are smarter but because they work together in a smarter way. They are tapping into a simple and powerful method in which a group of ordinary people can create a performance far beyond the sum of their parts.
Open source resources for you to do your own Design Challenge!
The kit list for the Design Challenge
Team size is best with 4–5 people.
Some thoughts:
1. Have one person record scores and one person with a tape measure reading out height trials for every 5 teams. Encourage trials after 10mins. Read out the time and have a clock visible. At 18mins ask the groups if they want two more mins. They WILL say yes! Then shut it all down.
2. Prepare all the materials in advance and put the masking tape on the table in the room prior to people coming to the room. I like giving teams a few sheets of paper and pens to plan. The best teams usually don’t sketch or plan…
3. Don’t announce the exercise in advance…no warning is better for participants to get the full value of the exercise.
4. Many teams will game it by trying to tie to the ceiling or use paper, pens etc. as materials. Praise them for their thinking out of the box but don’t allow any actions that give a team an unfair advantage.
5. Explain in the beginning that measurements are only valid if freestanding and not sagging for 3 seconds.
6. I like giving awards for most creative failure (rubber chicken) and a spaghetti dinner kit (with wine too if adults!) to the highest scoring team.
7. After time has elapsed, then it is great to go through the preso and have a group discussion about the team dynamics, listening, iterative value, working with the introverts and leveraging their talent etc.
The preso is here:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0lvwp0wdr07f4cl/AAAxHRjO5vV3Lt_pUT-2plvJa?dl=0
The Score Sheet is here:
THE Original Kindergarteners: San Carlos, Ca
At TED: Marshmallow Design Challenge
A note on the history of the Design Challenge:
While at IDEO, Dennis Boyle (one of the great benefactors of my career that I am forever indebted to), Christine Kurjan and I started introducing The Design Challenge into corporate “Design Thinking” training sessions as part of the “IDEO University” curriculum we created together. Honestly, I don’t remember exactly how the first rev of it came about but it evolved over a few years especially when I began doing the exercise at scale. I lectured and ran the exercise at Stanford, the University of California, Santa Clara University, Aalto University in Helsinki, IMD Business School in Lausanne, The University of Tokyo, and with teams at Steelcase, HTC (with HT and CEO Peter Chou) and others.
In 2006, I presented this at TED in Monterey (right in between Bert Rutan and Al Gore presenting An Inconvenient Truth…It was great siting with them!). In 2010, my friend Tom Wujec took this to another level and built a business with it helping companies innovate. He even presented several of my original slides including the Kinders above that I freely gave to him. Amazingly, TED posted only his presentation which I always thought was bogus but mine is available on YouTube and Vimeo and is included in the original 2006 CD-Rom set. I fully support Tom here and he does credit me.
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* I did have a few classes of Architecture students (notably at The University of California, Berkeley) that had high scores topping over 36” and nearly every team built impressive towers. Architectural students already have a built in domain knowledge.
