“What do the results of this exercise suggest about how business school students are learning to

work in teams?”

In the marshmallow exercise, Mr. Tom Wujec pointed out that business students perform poorly
as a team and have the worst result. The marshmallow here represents the challenge. There are
many factors that contribute to team success. To deal with challenges, we should first build a
collaborative team. Collaboration is the iterative process of two or more people working together
to build prototypes and refine them. Moreover, team members should also pay attention to work,
communicate well with each other and share ideas to successfully reach their goals. Therefore,
the main reason for the poor result of business students is that they are trained to find a single
right plan and lack communication. As a business student, I think this is understandable since
college students are mostly assigned individual work. When it comes to group assignments, we
meet up sometimes to talk about the assignment, divide work and start working on it. This
process is similar to the one Mr Tom Wujec mentioned in his speech, which includes orientation,
plan, and build. However, during this process, each person works individually on his/her tasks
and we tend to assume that our team members will do well on their assigned parts so weekly
meetings are not necessary. Hence, if a problem suddenly comes up, we do not have enough time
to fix the papers because we lack communication. This is the big problem which leads to bad
final results since teamwork requires effective communication and collaboration. This has been
proved by the kindergarten group in the marshmallow challenge. Not only do they produce the
tallest structures, but they also produce the most interesting ones. They start with the
marshmallow, build prototypes together, and they give each other instant feedback about what
works and what does not work. This is a great example of how to work effectively in a team
because when building prototypes, they will have multiple times to fix them and get the best
result. Once business students understand the value of collaboration and prototypes, they turn
out with strong success. Mrs Tom Wujec also proved this by giving the results of design student
teams after four months and all teams went from the very worst to the very best.
In conclusion, working together as a team is difficult since it requires a lot of high skills and
students tend to feel more comfortable when they work individually. However, group cohesion
plays an important role in the workplace. Therefore, all students should improve this skill for
themselves to increase their chances of getting dream jobs.