What the Marshmallow Challenge Can Teach You About Co-Design
We’ve all sat through our share of interminable, unproductive meetings. If we’re lucky, we’ve also experienced the opposite, meetings where our team is completely in synch and getting things done.
According to Kevin Hoffman, the difference between those two types of meetings is the ability to practice what he calls co-design. Co-design can happen whether you’re working remotely or in the same physical space. What matters is that your team is thinking and functioning collaboratively.
Kevin uses The Marshmallow Challenge to demonstrate the power of co-design. The challenge involves building a freestanding tower out of uncooked pasta that can bear the weight of a marshmallow.
In his challenges, the winning teams are the ones that exhibit the key facets of co-design: jump in, take risks, learn from failures, consider the input and perspectives of everyone on the team, and work as fast as they can to build the “minimum viable product.”