Why do some teams excel, adding up to be greater than the sum of their parts, while others, though overflowing with talent, seem to struggle to pull things together?
This question caused Peter Skillman, the Director of Design for Amazon Web Services, to hold a small experiment with students. For nearly a year, Skillman assembled small four-person teams at places like Stanford and the University of California and then placed them in competition with one another. He asked each group to build the highest possible structure using only the following items:
- Twenty pieces of uncooked spaghetti
- One yard of transparent tape
- One yard of string
- One standard-size marshmallow.
Their competition had only one rule: the marshmallow had to be on top. The interesting part of this experiment has less to do with the task Skillman asked teams to perform than the students that Skillman chose to be involved. Some of the teams were composed of business school students, while others consisted of kindergartners.
If we were asked to guess which teams would win, many of us would place their bet on the business school students outperforming their 5-year-old counterparts. And we would be wrong! Across dozens of trials, the kindergarten students built structures that averaged 26 inches tall, while the business school students built structures that averaged less than 10 inches tall. To further test the findings, the experiment has been run with teams of lawyers, CEOs, and other high-powered professionals and the kindergartners still come out on top, literally.
The outcome feels like an illusion. How can smart, more experienced individuals get bested by kindergarteners? According to author Daniel Coyle, the answer is found in our instincts to focus on the wrong details. We focus on individual skills, but what matters is relational interaction.
In the trials, the kindergartners succeeded not because they were smarter but because they worked together in a more effective way. There were no hidden agendas or social pecking orders to navigate. Rather, they stood shoulder to shoulder and worked energetically together. They moved quickly, spotting problems, calling them out, and offering help. They experimented, took risks, and noticed outcomes, which led them to productive solutions. According to Coyle, these young students were tapping into the foundational elements prevalent in some of the world’s most successful groups—Safety, Shared Vulnerability, and High Purpose.
Thankfully, we can too.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll explore these cultural building blocks, but for now, we simply invite you to reflect and get an anecdotal baseline of your team’s psychological safety. Click here to access “The Culture Code Quiz” on Daniel Coyle’s website. You can complete this brief assessment in less than a minute, and it will set the stage for next week’s article.
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Reflective Thought: Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do. (Daniel Coyle)
