Announced on: 07/29/10 In the middle of June, Tecture took a portion of the day to engage in a fun, yet challenging, team-building exercise.  Inspired by what we found here, http://www.marshmallowchallenge.com/Welcome.html , we decided to put Tecture to the test!

It was not for the faint of heart.

The challenge: a swing at a team exercise, created by Peter Skillman a few years ago, where Tecture was randomly broken up into three teams. These teams would be given four sets of materials:

- 20 sticks of dry spaghetti
- 1 yard of tape
- 1 yard of string
- 1 lone, delicious, marshmallow

The goal: to create the tallest, free-standing tower that would hold the marshmallow as high up from the tabletop as possible with a total of only 18 minutes for both planning and execution. The sticks, tape, and string could be used and abused by the teams as they saw fit, but the marshmallow had to stay in one piece.

Though the exercise was fun, it was also a window into project management as well as time management, and the difficulties that go along with it when incorporating a team comprised of many heads and exposing some interesting views of the nature of collaboration.

The three teams of Tecture took three distinct approaches to their task.

Team One used the majority of their time to plan their structure, ensuring a best-laid plan, but offering themselves little time to correct any potential hazards during execution.
(Raquel, Chris, Omar)

Team Two abandoned a lengthy planning process and, instead, just threw works-in-progress at the structure, continually refining during the stream of construction, to see what worked.
(Ricky, Srilu, Mike, Blake)

Team Three had an even mix of planning and execution, beginning its construction when a pre-determined deadline to begin construction was met.
(Tony, Jay, Anthony, Lily)

There were pros and cons to all approaches, but the teams were committed to the path they had chosen.

Within 18 minutes, Team One had erected a tower bringing their marshmallow to a height of 16", Team Two found a height of 21", and Team Three erected a tower that brought their marshmallow to 23" total.

The study conducted through this exercise shows that there are general types of people that have not historically done well in this exercise. Among the worst are recent graduates of business school. Among the best are...kindergartners.

Why? Because none of the kids jockey for team leadership and, instead, they spend more time building successive prototypes until they find one that works successfully. In the meantime, business school students will spend a majority of their time playing for a leadership role, planning and planning, settling on a design that "must" be the one that works, and then not allowing themselves enough time to recover once they find out in the seventeenth minute that they had planned everything all wrong.

Statistics show that the average height that a team will bring its marshmallow to is 20".
Business school students - 10"
Kindergartners - 25"
Lawyers - 15"
Architects - 39" (thankfully)
CEOs - 22"
And interestingly enough, CEOs with an executive admin - 30"

It was good to see that two out of three teams here at Tecture were above the average and the third blew business school students and lawyers out of the water.

And the winning team? Team three took home the gold with a great sense of achievement, a higher understanding of team dynamics....and gift cards to restaurant.com!

Check out the pics!