Crossing from China into Kazakhstan in a B747-400F
Thanks for joining me again for another week on the Educated Leadership Blog. This week we’re looking at teams that are handed a problem and given a limited amount of time to deal with it. The way the teams are put into this situation is through a simulation. If you have a moment, you can go to this website http://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower to see the logistics involved.
In case you cannot go to the site, what you would have seen was a TED Talk™ given by Mr. Tom Wujec about a team exercise called The Spaghetti Challenge™. In the exercise, teams of four people are given 20 sticks of dry spaghetti, a one-yard-long strip of paper tape, a one-yard-long piece of string or twine, and one standard size marshmallow. The teams are given 18 minutes to plan and build a tower out of the spaghetti tape and twine that will support the marshmallow. The goal is to have the tallest tower. The marshmallow must be at the top.
In what may be a surprising point, the logistical challenge of doing that is not the interesting part of the video. The data compiled by Mr. Wujec tells a very interesting story. The average height of the towers is around 20 inches high. The worst group at building the towers is recent business school graduates. The best groups at building towers are kindergarteners! The youngsters regularly build towers that surpass the 20-inch mark. The second best groups are made up of CEOs and their executive assistants. If the CEOs are in a group without an executive assistant, their performance falls off dramatically!
Mr. Wujec’s hypothesis for why the kindergarteners do so well is that they don’t waste a lot of time planning or posturing, they just start building prototypes and seeing what works. Conversely, the business people in the room spend a lot of the allotted time trying to make a plan for what should work and then are unable to make adjustments when their design fails to hold up the marshmallow. While I can see this is a big part of why the kids do so much better, I do not think it is the complete answer. A point that is not talked about is that kindergarteners do not necessarily worry about hurting someone’s feelings if they have an opinion. In other words, if they think what someone is doing is wrong, they will tell them. It may be done politely, or it may be done with a, “That’s stupid.” That cuts down on the time spent on designs that may not be as sturdy as needed. The kids also are not as likely to defer to a peer, so they will feel more free to speak up and more free to contribute ideas. CEOs may worry about the politics of saying something to a peer that runs a bigger company than they do, or who is older, or who is younger, or for some other reason. The fact that CEOs perform better with their executive assistants on the team points to the possibility that when CEOs do not have someone keeping them focused on the task, they are at a disadvantage.
One of the topics being covered this week in class is the subject of process interventions. Process interventions are when Organizational Development practitioners assist groups or teams in becoming more aware of the way they operate and the dynamics of how the group interacts (Brown, 2011, p. 199). The TED Talk video could be a good ice breaker for helping managers to see that standard business practices don’t always lead to the best results. Brown discussed group norms and growth as part of process interventions (2011). He noted that the norms of a group will drive what members of a team will or will not do (2011, p. 202). The kindergarteners appear to illustrate what operating outside of business norms may allow.
I will be showing this video to my team at a staff meeting in the very near future. I believe it will be a good conversation generator and will provide my team with data they could use in the future. Our overarching organization is discussing a structural and behavioral redesign and I believe information about process intervention could come in handy for them. Of course, it will ruin the surprise for them if they ever go to a workshop where this is the technique used to illustrate team dynamics!
Brown, D. R. (2011). An Experiential Approach to Organizational Development. Upper Saddle River, NJ, Prentice-Hall.
Talks, TED. (2010). Build a tower, build a team - Tom Wujec, www.ted.com.
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