Spaghetti, Marshmallow, and Business Strategy
Some root causes of weak strategies
Strategy — map it out yourself
Some root causes of weak strategies
Victor, the CEO, was disappointed. At least he told me so at the dinner. We spent two intense days with him and his team in a distant hotel in a rural place where the Internet barely worked. Our goal was to find new disruptive ideas for the company’s strategy, but we had to admit we didn’t find many. I used many different techniques, and the team tried to answer dozens of questions. But Victor was not satisfied.
“It was too obvious… Everybody on the market knows or even does it. Not a single original idea,” he complained to me.
“What’s wrong with the team?” he asked me.
There was nothing particularly wrong with the team. Unfortunately, many teams fall into the same trap.
The marshmallow challenge
“A few years ago, the designer and engineer Peter Skillman held a competition to find out. Over several months, he assembled a series of four-person groups at Stanford, the University of California, the University of Tokyo, and a few other places. He challenged each group to build the tallest possible structure using the following items:
• twenty pieces of uncooked spaghetti
• one yard of transparent tape
• one yard of string
• one standard-size marshmallow
The contest had one rule: the marshmallow had to end up on top. The fascinating part of the experiment, however, had less to do with the task than with the participants. Some of the teams consisted of business school students. The others consisted of kindergarteners”.
This is the quote from Daniel Coyle’s book The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups. What do you think — who won this challenge, business school students or kindergarteners? The latter almost always did.
Cause #1
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Coming up with original ideas implies creativity but does not awaken on its own, only because the team is cut from their daily routine and asked unusual questions. Open any book on creativity, and you’ll definitely find a paragraph in which the author insists that the level of a person’s creativity depends directly on the amount of information about the subject that one has accumulated.
• Leonardo was a genius not only because he was gifted — he devoted all his life to what he did
• Steve Jobs spent years studying the computing world, which helped him invent Mac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, etc.
• Elon Musk became the largest Tesla shareholder in 2004 and the CEO in 2008. Model S, the first genuinely successful car, appeared only in 2012.
But Victor’s team didn’t collect much data on market trends, customer needs, and technological discoveries. Moreover, they were up their necks in operations, so they weren’t particularly creative.
Conclusion — expand the knowledge horizons of your team. Make them go out of the office and visit your customers, industrial exhibitions, and forums. Ask them to read many related articles and discuss them. Victor devoted much time to keeping up with the market, but he was not on the same page with his subordinates.
Cause #2
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
We all have our worldviews or mental models. These models are pillars underpinning our self-esteem. We must believe we know the things, and how the world works, otherwise our lives will be full of anxiety and worry.
But strategic thinking is about embracing the idea that:
• The world around us will change
• Our routine must change as well
So, to think strategically, people need to undermine their self-confidence with their own hands, but it is hard.
Conclusion — create a supportive atmosphere for your team. Help them overcome their natural fears of change. Try to show them that it may be exciting and they will benefit from it.
Cause #3
Daniel Coyle explained the reason why kindergarteners defeated business school students time after time at the Marshmallow Challenge in a blowout. The formers were focused on solving the task, whereas the latter centered on the status issue:
“The business school students appear to be collaborating, but in fact they are engaged in a process psychologists call status management. They are figuring out where they fit into the larger picture: Who is in charge? Is it okay to criticize someone’s idea: What are the rules here? … Instead of focusing on the task, they are navigating their uncertainty about one another. They spend so much time managing status that they fail to grasp the essence of the problem (the marshmallow is relatively heavy, and the spaghetti is hard to secure). As a result, their first efforts often collapse, and they run out of time.”
I have seen such a group dynamic at numerous strategic workshops. When the leader asks the team members to think about the future, they find themselves outside their comfort zone. They cannot hide behind their cozy operational routine, and their statuses are under threat.
• Will my current status suffer because of strategic changes?
• Will I have to solve unfamiliar tasks?
• Will I reveal my incompetence in addressing new challenges?
Such questions swirl around participants’ heads during strategic workshops.
Conclusion — creating a supportive atmosphere for your people will be of much help to overcome this obstacle too. Strategy means change, and change means fears; it’s only natural. And this is the leader’s job to help the team members feel free to propose new ideas without being scared about their future in the company.
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