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Why Most Software Developers Struggle To Improve
You limit yourself more than you realize
What You Can Learn From Kindergarteners
In a 2006 Ted Talk, Peter Skillman introduced a very interesting design challenge known as The Marshmallow Design Challenge.
The experiment itself is very simple. You take a large group of people and divide them into teams of five. The goal of each team is to build the tallest free-standing structure possible out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and a single marshmallow that is gingerly placed on top. Each team has 18 minutes to build their tower and the tallest structure wins.
Technology pioneer and Autodesk fellow Tom Wujec saw great value in this experiment and decided to implement the design challenge in several workshops he hosted on teamwork. The people who would attend such workshops spanned from engineers, architects, and C-suite execs to lawyers, business school graduates, and… kindergarteners.
Among these groups, he found that the teams comprised of engineers and architects obviously performed the best. What was more surprising, though, was that kindergartners regularly beat out all the other teams, with business school grads and lawyers building the worst structures.
