My take on the spaghetti marshmallow tower building exercise

The purpose of this exercise is to introduce teams to Agile and Scrum in a practical (and hopefully fun!) way and to help collaboration and teamwork.

I have run this exercise a number of times when standing up new teams and have iterated on it and made it better each time. Initially I ran this with 1 team of 8 people, recently I ran it with 8 teams of 70+ people (a small number of people were online rather than in person).

Objective

Build the tallest free-standing structure with a pink marshmallow on the top.

The team that builds the tallest structure measured from the table’s surface to the top of the marshmallow wins the challenge.

Rules

1. The whole pink marshmallow must be on top of the structure. Teams are expected to place the pink marshmallow at the top of the free-standing structure. Any team that intentionally destroys hides or eats its pink marshmallow is automatically disqualified.
2. Use bits of string, spaghetti or white marshmallow for construction. Teams can break their spaghetti and cut their string or tape into bits to make new structures.
3. You can use spare marshmallow for construction, but you must have a whole marshmallow on top.
4. DO NOT USE THE TAPE!
5. All teams must stop working when the time is up. Any team that attempts to support or hold their structure at the end of the challenge will be disqualified.

Each Team will have:

Phase 1 – BUILD BUILD BUILD!

Each team to start building for 10 minutes. No planning but at the end of this phase we want to see a tower.

Measure the height of each team’s tower at the end of this phase.

Phase 2 – Retro, plan and build

• Retro and Plan!! (5 minutes)
  Do not touch building materials or your tower
• Build (5 minutes)

Measure the height of each team’s tower at the end of this phase.

Phase 3 – Retro, plan, build and stakeholder input

• Retro and Plan (5 minutes)
• Build (5 minutes)
• At any time, you can ask ONE question of the stakeholder (me!)

Teams can ask for more construction materials, you can give advice and at this point you can remove the constraint of not using the tape. It’s a red herring! Some teams will have figured this out by now.

Phase 4 – Showcase and Winner

Final measure of every team’s tower. Winner announced.

Wrap Up & Reflection

• Ask the question – What have we learned today?”
• Hopefully we had fun! Maybe we learned a little about Agile and Scrum. We introduced planning, retrospectives and reviews.
• This exercise could be a microcosm of the team. I have had teams say “we had too many people” – but we have too many people in our team! “Some people do not communicate” – but they do not communicate in ceremonies or events.
• Maybe suggest the teams run a retro on the team dynamics and how hard it is to collaborate when we are all not in person face to face.
• Most team’s tower will get bigger each phase – we delivered value earlier and iterated each phase. Would we have been as successful if we ran this game in a waterfall or traditional way? Thoughts?

Images

Tips and tricks

• Avoid gluten free pasta, it is very brittle! I discovered the hard way.
• Use Spaghettoni #7 rather than Spaghetti #5 or Spaghettini #3. It is thicker and less liable to break.
• Prepare team kits in plastic (reusable) takeaway boxes before the activity. Makes set up much easier.