The Marshmallow Maneuver

Marshmallows are exquisite probes of the human psyche.

So, here’s a question: what relationship do marshmallows, tape, string, scientific discovery, and uncooked spaghetti all have in common?  (And in case you’re wondering, this week’s feature photo is a bundle of uncooked spaghetti photographed from above.)

The answer to the question above comes from answering another question as posed in the book by journalist Warren Berger A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas.  I came across Berger’s book while doing preliminary research for formulating my discovery cycle (which I’ll log entries on for each phase of the cycle I’m using in early 2019).  It was a welcome reference entry for the first phase of the cycle, asking questions.  Questions are what ignite the process of scientific discovery because they express and focus the desire to know more about something, inspiring us to act.  It turns out that asking questions about how to ask questions was trickier to find information on that I thought it would be.  It’s not something we spend much conscious time or effort on.  We worry more about answering questions well rather than asking questions well.

So back to Berger’s provocative question, which was the following: “How do you build a tower that doesn’t collapse (even after you put the marshmallow on top)?” (p.120)

It turns out that this is what has been asked of a number of groups in various studies and posed as an exercise in design innovation workshops the world over.  In the usual form, participants are asked to build the tallest free-standing structure they can, in an allotted time, using just pasta, tape, and string and with one marshmallow placed on top.  Interestingly enough, among various groups of participants, two stand out in comparison: kindergarteners outperform graduate MBA students on this task.  Part of the reason lies in psychology.

There is a long tradition of marshmallow tests, kindergarteners, and psychology.  The most famous example in popular culture is a study that used marshmallows (among other sweet treats) to investigate willpower in kindergartners and its correlations with later life outcomes.  In that study, kids were given the option to get one marshmallow now or wait for a bit and, in return, get two later.  It appeared that children’s choices between instant gratification (give me one now) and delayed gratification (I’ll wait for two later) were linked to outcomes in adolescence.  Though the jury is still out on exactly how and with what outcomes this test correlates.

I had heard of this story (it’s often in the news), so when I came across marshmallows and kindergartners in Berger’s book, I assumed I already knew the punchline: if you are patient with a question and mull it over it will lead to more positive outcomes.  It turns out I was dead wrong.  When it comes to asking questions, patience is your friend.  But when it comes to answering questions, instant gratification seems to be the way to go.

Here’s what the marshmallow tower studies have found: groups that engage in many trials throughout the allotted time, building, failing, and trying again, on average end up with taller structures.  Kindergarteners jump right in to this approach, preferring a hands-on tactic and prototyping early and often to try and succeed.  In contrast, other groups, like MBA students, spend the majority of their allotted time discussing how they should approach and try to solve the problem.  This results in fewer actual attempts and on average shorter structures (or no successful structures at all!) as a result.

It seems then that Berger’s book not only discusses how and what kind of questions spark breakthroughs (which I’ll cover in a later log entry), but also how best to start trying to answer those questions: trial and error.  If you’ve read many of my log entries on the site, you’ll know favoring trial and error and failure is fast becoming a recurrent theme.  But it’s always good to have reminders.  This is part of the intent of the ARTEMIS virtual reality software being built: to give you a way to build mental models of what you are trying to discover fast and often.  And if you read much in the startup (like Eric Reis’ Lean Start Up), software (like Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time), or entrepreneurial arenas (like Jake Knapp’s Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just 5 Days) then you will know that rapid prototyping to test out answers and learn by getting immediate feedback is all the rage right now.

So, trying out the marshmallow maneuver, with office supplies and uncooked food to build my own tower, may be the way to remind myself of the value of fearlessly trying out answers to big, weighty, scientific discovery questions.  A great scientific discoverer, Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb, once said in an interview with Harper’s Monthly Magazine (1890):

“I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently to be true.  Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory.”

(Thomas Edison, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 1890)

He’s talking about theories, not experiments.  Three-thousand-theories.  As a theoretical particle physicist that really resonates by “quantifying” the “degree of try” it might take to even think up a good answer to a good question.  Besides, maybe if there’s a marshmallow at the end of every attempt, I’ll get better at generating my own 3,000 theories to find the 2 that work.  And if I’m smart, I’ll go after that marshmallow today and not wait until tomorrow.