Odds are it will be something you’re not currently thinking about. Next time you’re in the lunch room, sit down next to one of those solitary diners, and ask him or her what’s new. These people, who so often fill us with fear of social stigma (What was life like for them in high school !?!) – can often be vital sources for creative insight. What she was talking about were not real aliens, of course, but social ones - the people (and every company has them) who don’t quite fit in – the ones who make weird comments during meetings, who eat lunch alone, and are generally shunned.
#Marshmallow dual status clock software
This advice was given to me from software entrepreneur Donna Auguste when we sat together on a board that was helping a newspaper company assess investments in innovation projects. There’s a simple way to start diversifying your network immediately, without leaving your building: go hug an alien. Ask yourself: Do you have any mentors that are 20 years older than you are? Or 20 years younger? How many of your regular associates are artists, novelists, or entrepreneurs, who routinely deal with ambiguity? How many people do you know who’ve grown up in a different country, or even better, naturally think biculturally because they’ve lived in more than one? How many do you know outside your (or your spouse’s) field? Diversifying requires taking deliberate steps. If you’re like most people, your network will tend to be filled with people of the same background, who went to the same sorts of schools, who are in the same industry. Outside work that could mean learning a new language or picking up a new musical instrument.Īnother is to take a hard look at the nature of your associates and networks. At work that might involve volunteering for a new-product launch or taking an assignment in a new country. One way to tap into your inner kindergartner is to adopt what a Zen master would call “a beginner’s mind.” That is, to put yourself in situations where you don’t know the answer and don’t have the skills to find it.
What these findings show us is that if it’s possible to suppress your innate urge to be creative and curious, it’s also possible to unleash it again. This result fits with many researchers’ consistent findings that that innovation happens most often when different mind-sets and skills collide. And they beat the kindergartners when they’re paired with their executive administrators. Perhaps they started from a much higher base, but it is also possible that people who make it to the top find a way to recover at least some of that innate curiosity. Still, teams made up of CEOs do better than the aspiring MBAs, though it’s not clear why. What’s the lesson here? It’s hard to escape the conclusion that we all begin with creativity and curiosity, which too many of us systematically unlearn as we go through the education system and scale up the corporate ladder. Sure, groups can sometimes descend into chaos (the teacher in my six-year-old daughter Holly’s first-grade class gives teams unlimited marshmallows because she’s worried someone will eat the single one before the tower is constructed), but the results can be stunning. Children don’t dither they simply try something. As the father of three young children, this does not surprise me. While MBA students do poorly, kindergarteners beat the average. Then, with about a minute to go, someone places the marshmallow on top of the beautiful tower, and….it collapses. Construction begins, usually with less than eight minutes left on the clock.
The next few minutes are devoted to planning. They spend the first few minutes trying to establish dominance. In an arresting seven-minute TED talk, Autodesk fellow Tom Wujec shares data suggesting that, while the average team produces a tower with a height of about 20 inches, business school students tend to significantly underperform the average. Our team at Innosight also uses it as a staple in leadership development workshops. It’s a great way to teach the benefits of rapid prototyping. This is the so-called marshmallow challenge, a staple of many design schools. They have 18 minutes to build a free-standing structure that will enable the marshmallow to rest on top. Each team gets 20 sticks of spaghetti, a yard of string, strips of scotch tape, and a single marshmallow. Imagine a room filled with 30 people, divided into six teams.
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