“Because, frankly, every project has its own marshmallow, doesn’t it?”
About two weeks ago, I read Aaron’s blog post about the Marshmallow Challenge, which was quite similar with our in-class Paper Tower exercise. A team would be assigned a task to build the tallest free-standing structure with limited resources. He identified the five stages of group development from the challenge and evaluated the interesting fact that kindergarteners performed way better than business students because they never hesitate to make mistakes.
By watching the referenced TED talk video, I had a chance to think about a team experiencing and trying to manage inevitable failures in the prototyping process in order to achieve a goal. Prototyping is a constant process of trying out new ideas, experiencing, and learning from failures. However, we all know that experiencing failure is very emotionally tired and hard thing to manage especially you are in a team.
It is hard for any team to admit and face failure directly. I would say that it is not a good idea to attribute the cause of failure to a specific person or situation. Therefore, we have to be aware of self-serving bias as well as fundamental attribution error because team members have to work closely together toward a common objective and are accountable to one another.2 Instead of promoting future conflicts and disharmony in a team, what they need to do as a team is examine and reflect upon the failures so they can prevent them from happening again later.
To sum up, I strongly believe creating a comfortable team atmosphere should be more encouraged in order to let team members discuss freely with the failures that they have made so far. Eventually, by accepting failures as valuable learning opportunities and working together to make future improvements, the team members will be able to come up with more creative and innovative outcomes like the kindergarteners who aced the Marshmallow Challenge.
References
- Business School vs. Kindergarten Students
- Wujec, Tom. “Build a Tower, Build a Team.” TED. Feb. 2010. Lecture.
- Langton, Robbins, Judge, Organizational Behaviour, 7th edition, p. 39, 67, 205.