Kids built taller spaghetti towers than business school grads by doing something adults forgot how to do

Tom Wujec has spent years traveling the globe with a handful of spaghetti sticks. As part of his corporate team-building workshops, he often asks groups to do a silly, counterintuitive task: build a tower out of dry spaghetti and tape, make it as tall as possible, and build it strong enough to hold the weight of one marshmallow. Oh, and do it fast. “The Marshmallow Challenge is a fun and instructive design exercise that encourages teams to work in these conditions to learn profound lessons in collaboration, innovation, and creativity,” he says. “It’s simple, fun, and instructive.” But now, having done the exercise with groups of all ages and backgrounds around the world, he’s learned a lot about who succeeds at the challenge and who struggles. Kids routinely outperform business school grads in marshmallow challenge A surprising group repeatedly appears in Wujec’s data and observations as having difficulty with the Marshmallow Challenge: “On every measure… the group that consistently does the worst is recent graduates of business school. MBA students. They suck. They’re terrible,” he teases in a TED Talk. As for groups that do well? The usual suspects, of course: engineers and architects. But another group seems to shine wherever Wujec takes his bundle of supplies: kindergarteners and all manner of young school kids. Why kids are amazing at building fast Wujec says that many of the groups he studies, and especially the business students, waste a lot of time. They have 18 minutes to complete their tower, and many adults spend a good portion of that time debating ideas and jockeying for leadership within the group. Then, they spend far too long planning and strategizing. You might expect kids to be exceedingly creative and good at thinking outside the box, and that’s true. Wujec notes that groups of kids come up with wild, truly unique designs that adults can’t conceive. But the other thing kids do well is fail. They’re not afraid of their tower falling down. So what do they do? They build fast, running with the first good idea they come up with. If it doesn’t work, and the tower won’t hold the marshmallow? They simply start again, with plenty of time left on the clock to iterate or start over completely. “They start with the marshmallow. They generally don’t talk, they stick things in the marshmallow. The marshmallow falls over, and they fix it, and start over,” Wujec explains. So while the business school grads are deciding who’s the leader of the group and sketching out their vision, the kids are already on their third prototype. Kindergarteners don’t just outperform business school grads—they do better than the average of all the groups Wujec has tested, and regularly outperform some whip-smart folks like lawyers and CEOs. In a LinkedIn post, behavioral scientist Michael Rucker writes that adults often fear failure much more than children. When trying something new, kids can be scared for many reasons, but their approach not working is usually not one of them. They lead with curiosity and fun, and they see what happens. The Marshmallow Challenge is a wonderful reminder for adults: what would it look like to just go for it? No waiting for permission, no jockeying for authority, just grabbing the marshmallow and going to work, knowing that every time it falls down, you’re one step closer to the ultimate goal, whatever it may be.