2. Who Am I
2
Derek Chen
Agile Coach
An agile practitioner who love to promote agile
practices, and has rich experiences in Scrum,
Kanban and Large Scale Scrum
“Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”
4. Objective
Build the tallest free standing tower that will
support a marshmallow on the top
4
Game was introduced by Peter Skillman.
Tom Wujec has conducted this game in 70 workshops, he has conducted
with the bigger group of 800 people.
Source: https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower_build_a_team
8. Debriefing
• Was the task harder than you initially thought?
• Did you make any assumptions during the exercise?
• If you could do this task again, would you do anything differently?
• What lessons does this challenge present to us?
8
29. Two groups are asked to solve the Candle Problem
29
Group A is offered no reward
Group A
Group B is offered monetary rewards
• The fastest 25% of people get $5
• The fastest person get $20
Group B
30. Results: Group B is 3.5 minutes slower
30
Faster despite no reward
Group A
Much slower despite being
offered reward
Group B
31. This makes no sense! Everyone
knows that if you want people to
perform better you reward them,
right?
31
32. What if “Functional Fixedness” was removed
32
Group A is offered no reward
Group A
Group B is offered monetary rewards
• The fastest 25% of people get $5
• The fastest person get $20
Group B
33. Results: Group B is much faster than Group A
33
For the simpler task, Group A now
performs relatively slower to group B
Group A
The reward motivates Group B
to complete a straightforward task faster
Group B
34. What Is Your Problem?
34
When the task requires cognitive skills, a larger
reward may lead to poorer performance.
Non-routine
When the task only requires mechanical skills,
bonuses function as expected: a larger reward
leads to better performance.
Routine
37. Summary
• Rapid Prototyping, Small Iterations
• Effective Communication
• Identify the Hidden Assumptions
• The connection between incentives and success
37
38. Reference
• Marshmallow Design Challenge by Peter Skillman
• Build a tower, build a team by Tom Wujec
• Spaghetti tower- Marshmallow Challenge by Todd Bloch
• DevOps game marshmallow challenge by Murughan Palaniachari
• Dan Pink 談叫⼈意想不到的激勵科學 by Dan Pink
• Can money actually be detrimental to performance? The Candle Problem by aknowbrainer
• The “CANDLE” problem by Nicholas Chee
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