Johnny posted a fascinating TED talk by Tom Wujec that touches on some themes that I've talked about before, as well as some valuable lessons on collaboration. Tom has run more than 70 design workshops around the world with a variety of audiences from Fortune 50 CTO's, to business school graduates, to kindergarten children, and featuring an exercise called The Marshmallow Challenge. I'll not spoil the talk, but suffice to say that one of the most interesting lessons is demonstrated by the fact that kindergarten children outperformed the business school graduates by some margin in the task, brilliantly illustrating (as Johnnie also points out) the creative limitations of much business thinking, habits and training. I'm running a workshop on innovation this week and I'm going to try this out…
4 responses to “The Marshmallow Challenge”
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I just wonder if the issue is that business people are made to think ‘profit’ first and so automatically filter all their ideas based on economic logic rather than them simply not having the ability to think creatively.
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I just wonder if the issue is that business people are made to think ‘profit’ first and so automatically filter all their ideas based on economic logic rather than them simply not having the ability to think creatively.
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Quite possibly. For me it’s not about not having the ability, it’s about business feeling comfortable with predictability. That point about business grads setting a single plan and then executing it – so much of business is like that
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Quite possibly. For me it’s not about not having the ability, it’s about business feeling comfortable with predictability. That point about business grads setting a single plan and then executing it – so much of business is like that
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