Imagine walking into work one day and your boss decides to divide you into teams of four with the following challenge – to build the largest structure you can using 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string and one marshmallow, which has to be placed at the top of the structure. It’s an unusual assignment, to be sure, but it’s also the basis of a sociological experiment on teamwork called “The Marshmallow Challenge”.

In his TED talk “Build a tower, build a team”, Tom Wujec shares his findings from performing this challenge with a variety of different groups – recent business school graduates, lawyers, engineers, CEOs, and even kindergarten students. As you’ll see, his observations about how the various groups approached the challenge gave rise to some surprising, and at times humorous, results:

While Wujec shares some interesting points on the nature of how we collaborate and the process of design, there are some additional lessons we can learn from this challenge on how leaders can guide their teams to a successful outcome: Click here to continue reading »”What The Marshmallow Challenge Can Teach Us About Fostering Team Success”

One of my favourite websites that I love to peruse is TED.com. It’s a site that shares with the public presentations given by some of today’s most insightful thinkers and gifted creators as a means to help spread knowledge and the sharing of ideas. Now who wouldn’t love a site that tries to accomplish that.

A few days ago, TED.com posted a new talk given by poet/author Chris Abani called “Telling stories of our shared humanity“. Don’t let the title fool you – this is a powerful presentation that will have you laughing and crying all in the span of 15 minutes. Click here to continue reading »”Chris Abani on TED – A Wonderful Look At Our Humanity”