When was the last time you heard or saw an ice cream truck? In this Thought Bubble, Ellie describes a fun encounter with an ice cream truck that brought back memories of her five-year-old self living in the suburbs of California.
Throwback to the time when we had fun at playgrounds swinging on monkey bars and swings, playing hopscotch, jumping rope, and fooling around in the sandbox. Looking back, it seemed so natural for us to work/play together with people we just met and to make friends.
I was in an entrepreneurship bootcamp last semester, and we did a little team-building exercise called the spaghetti tower challenge (aka the marshmallow challenge) where teams of five compete against other teams to build the tallest structure using sticks of spaghetti, string, tape, and one marshmallow that’s supposed to be at the top of the tower as a marker for measuring. This challenge is timed for 18 minutes, and the team with the tallest tower (aka whose tower has the highest marshmallow) wins.
The result: my team had the tallest tower. Yay!!! During the debrief of that exercise, the bootcamp alluded to Tom Wujec’s TED Talk “Build a tower, build a team”, in which he points out that the people who do the best at this challenge are kindergartners - building towers much much taller than those of MBA and post grad students (who often performed the worst). Isn’t it ironic that MBA students who are taught collaboration and leadership skills in business school do the worst? Well that’s because these MBA students follow what they’re taught in school too rigidly (such as having a set project timeline where they spend way too much time deciding who the official team “leader” is and “allocating” tasks to everyone instead of actually building the tower). Meanwhile these kindergartners are out here building away and work together and communicate very naturally. They don’t try to grapple for power and try to be the official “team leader”. It’s all a very creative and naturally collaborative process, without the constraints of a “textbook” system.
The reason I mention this marshmallow challenge is to highlight the benefits of feeling like a kid again and how that feeling can open up so much creativity and collaboration, which is probably why companies like Google create spaces that try to emulate that sense of playfulness to inspire creativity and open-mindedness. It’s beneficial to do things to feel like a kid again that help you find your own ‘sandbox’, whether it’s eating ice cream, drawing, playing with plushies, etc.
I really hope to see more spaces or playgrounds for adults to relax, have fun, and to relive their childhood. For most of us, it’s great stress relief!
Also… does that mean that my team has the brain of a bunch of kindergartners if we did so well during the marshmallow challenge? Haha just kidding lol ;)
Until next time,
Ellie
Tom Wujec’s TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower_build_a_team
