What's your Marshmallow?

Were you successful?

You can learn more from an hour of play than from a year of conversation. Socrates said this a few years back (okay, about 2400 years back). When I first heard this phrase, almost 2 decades ago, I realized that, if it were true, I should change my entire hiring process. I started asking, how can I see the candidates "at play" so that I can learn who they really are. That thought process is a very popular discussion in my Creative Leadership book, keynote, and workshop.

But... were you successful?

I've conducted versions of this marshmallow tower with thousands of participants. At the end, I love to ask the groups if they were successful. The answers are intriguing. Some groups have no tower, but consider themselves successful. Others have a very impressive structure, but consider their efforts to be a failure.

Why?

It comes down to a question we live with but rarely re-consider. How do you define success? Who do you allow (or who have you allowed) to define success for you?

One group at a recent corporate leadership retreat in Vail, Colorado told me that they were an "Absolute and unequivocal success." They had no tower. Their table was a mess of spaghetti, marshmallow, tape. A perplexed participant from another team asked, "Why do you think you were successful? Your tower's a disaster!"

This team's reply: "We had a blast. We wanted to have fun on this retreat. We wanted to let our guard down. We wanted to question some assumptions. We wanted to laugh. We wanted to be willing to try different approaches, even some that might not work.... we succeeded!"

In other words, their "marshmallow"... their definition of success... was different from the one I handed to the group.

Did they ever succeed!

Do you let other people decide what the marshmallow is?

What will you do about that?