The Spaghetti Tower Challenge
Why Kindergarteners Destroy MBAs at Teamwork
Have you heard of Peter Skillman's Spaghetti Tower Challenge? (If you haven't participated yet, spoiler alert: I'm about to ruin the surprise.)
I did this exercise a few years back, and what happened completely flipped my understanding of how teams really work.
The Setup
Teams get 18 minutes. Four ingredients: 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of masking tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. Build the tallest free-standing structure with the marshmallow on top.
That's it. Sounds easy, right?
Peter Skillman (former VP of Design at Palm, later Nokia) and Tom Wujec (Fellow at Autodesk) have run this spaghetti tower challenge with thousands of people. Business school students, lawyers, engineers, CEOs—you name it.
The kindergarteners kicked everyone's butt.
Not kidding. While MBA students averaged around 10 inches and lawyers did even worse, kindergarteners consistently built towers averaging 26 inches. They didn't just win—they obliterated the competition.
Why Five-Year-Olds Embarrass Educated Adults
Here's what the business students did: They held meetings. They planned. They strategized. They debated who should be "CEO of Spaghetti, Inc." They spent 15 minutes talking and 3 minutes building.
Then they stuck the marshmallow on top.
Collapse.
Crisis mode. Panic. Game over.
Here's what the kindergarteners did: They started building. Immediately. No meetings, no power struggles, no grand plans. Just... "Let's try this!"
They built something. It fell down. "Okay, let's try that!" They built again. It fell down again. "What about this way?"
By minute 18, they'd tried a dozen different approaches and landed on something that actually worked.
The Real Lesson (It's Not About Building)
This isn't about spaghetti or marshmallows. It's about how teams approach any challenge.
The adults were optimizing for looking smart. The kids were optimizing for learning fast.
The adults committed to their first idea. The kids treated every idea as a cheap experiment.
The adults feared failure. The kids expected it.
The marshmallow represents every project's hidden assumptions—the stuff you don't discover until you actually build something. Business students assume it's light and fluffy. (It's not. It's dense and heavy and will collapse your carefully planned tower.)
Every project has its marshmallow moment. That integration that should be simple but isn't. That feature that seems straightforward until you try to build it. That client requirement that seemed clear until you deliver.
What This Means for Your Team
1. Put that ego aside. The kindergarteners didn't waste time figuring out who was in charge. They just started solving the problem.
2. Don't overly judge ideas initially. Those five-year-olds tried everything. No idea was too stupid to test.
3. Try things intelligently. Not randomly—intelligently. Build, test, learn, iterate. Fast.
4. Seek failure like a scientist tests a hypothesis. The kids expected things to fall down. So when they did, it was just data, not defeat.
The kindergarteners understood something the MBAs forgot: learning by doing is the fastest way to get real feedback.
You can't think your way to the right answer when you don't know what you don't know. You have to build your way there.
The Question That Matters
Think about your team's last big challenge. Did you spend more time planning the perfect solution or building and testing multiple approaches?
Because here's the thing: while you were in that third planning meeting, the kindergarteners were already on prototype number seven.
And theirs was taller.
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