A group of kindergarteners outperformed the CEOs, lawyers, and MBAs.
The way they did it has a lesson I've never been able to forget.
While in college over a decade ago, I watched a TED Talk by a famed designer named Peter Skillman about an experiment he conducted in which groups of participants were given a challenge...
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Transcript
Let's talk about how to win more with the Tinkerers mindset.
A group of kindergarteners outperformed the CEOs, lawyers, and MBAs.
The way they did it has a lesson I've never been able to forget.
While in college, over a decade ago, I watched a TED Talk by fame designer Peter Skillman.
About an experiment he conducted in which groups of participants were given a challenge.
They were asked to build the tallest tower possible with the following items.
20 pieces of dried spaghetti, one yard of string, one yard of tape, and one marshmallow,
which had to end up at the top of this tower.
There were a variety of groups who went through this challenge.
Kindergarteners, CEOs, lawyers, and MBA students.
The results were rather shocking.
Kindergarteners outperformed all of them, and by a significant margin.
CEOs came in next, lawyers behind them, and the MBA students in last,
often failing to create a structure that could withstand the weight of the marshmallow at the top.
So, the big question here is, why have this happened?
Well, in a later presentation, Tom Wujek, a friend of Skillman who ran the same experiment
in workshops around the world, highlighted the differences in how the various groups
approached the problem, saying, quote,
So normally, most people begin by orienting themselves to the task.
They talk about it, they figure out what it's going to look like, they jockey for power.
Then they spend some time planning, organizing, they sketch, and they lay out spaghetti.
And then finally, just as they're running out of time,
someone takes out the marshmallow and they gingerly put it on top.
What Kindergarteners do differently is that they start with the marshmallow,
and they build prototypes, successive prototypes.
So they have multiple times to fix when they build prototypes along the way.
And with each version, kids get instant feedback about what works and what doesn't work.
And quote, interestingly, in follow-up experiments,
architects and engineers perform similar or better than the Kindergarteners,
which further reinforce the understanding of how quality results are created.
The lesson here is quite simple.
Thinking, planning, strategizing, and organizing often get in the way of doing.
This lesson hits me hard, because honestly, I see a lot of myself in the CEO's lawyers,
and yes, even the MBA students.
For most of my life, I was a big planner.
When I decided to dive into something new,
I'd spend days, weeks, and often months gathering information
before I really got started.
There was a whole lot of movement that wasn't really progress.
I basically assumed that my life looked like a straight line across,
where I thought that I had to build to the point of clarity,
have that clarity perfectly before getting started,
and then I was going to try a bunch of things,
and I was just going to continue at that same level of clarity
as I pursued the different initiatives.
If you buy into that version of reality,
you place extraordinary emphasis on the upfront work,
you know, the work to actually build the clarity in advance of getting started
in advance of trying things,
because you believe that pre-start clarity is going to be what you need
in order to carry you through.
But that's a total trap.
Because while you read research and build business plans,
you're just engaged in a dressed up version of procrastination.
As the old saying goes, you can dress up a peg in a tuxedo,
but it's still a pig.
I learned it the hard way.
You can dress up procrastination however you'd like.
Give it some fancy names, hide behind the illusion of progress,
but it's still procrastination.
The truth is that most things in life are built through trying things.
As you try more and more things,
clarity slowly starts increasing,
almost imperceptively at first,
until it starts to build more and more and more.
And then, in a day, you create more clarity through trying things
than you did in a month a few months ago.
It compounds on top of each other, in other words.
At first, it'll feel like you're stuck and going nowhere,
then suddenly the clarity gains of a single point in time
from continuing to try things are going to trump what you were able to do
in weeks or months earlier on.
Clarity comes gradually then suddenly,
but only if it finds you doing.
I think of it as embracing the tinkerers mindset.
Try stuff.
Fail quickly learn from each failure.
Try more stuff.
The cost of failure is much lower than you think.
Nobody's judging you.
Nobody cares.
The kindergarteners weren't worried about what other people would think
if their tower fell down.
They weren't worried about looking or sounding smarter
