Iterate, Iterate

Give a group of well-educated adults a task to complete, and they’ll set to planning right away. This is very sensible! That’s exactly what they go to school to learn to do: to anticipate future events by understanding the world better.

Today, this task involves marshmallows, dry spaghetti, string, and tape. A group of four smart-smarties is supposed to use these ingredients to create the tallest structure they can in a certain period of time, usually 18 minutes.

For at least the first five or ten minutes, the four geniuses start planning and sketching out how they’re going to approach the problem at hand. By about 15 minutes in, they have their working prototype, and after a little bit of last-minute tweaking, they end up with a pretty tall structure.

By contrast, if you give the same task and ingredients to a group of reasonably curious five year olds, you might expect some kind of vaguely potato-shaped structures that are more messy than they are tall. You might be very surprised, then, to find out that the group of kids will often create structures that are taller than their adult counterparts.

In other words, very young children are better at building structures than well educated adults, at least in some situations.

Are the kids born with the innate knowledge of foundational architectural principles? Do we make them dumber by sending them off to school? What’s going on here?

It turns out that these kids really are onto something, but it’s not just a principle that applies to architecture. Instead, they’re using a method of figuring things out that might be summarized as:

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Project managers have a good word for this method of trial-and-error. They call it the iterative approach, and it can seem messy and unprofessional when you’re looking in from the outside. Yet, there is a method to the seeming madness that involves dozens of micro-experiments running all the time, one right after another.

With each little marshmallow house, the group of kids throws the kitchen sink at the problem, trying out five or six different configurations for the foundation and sort of seeing how they stand up, all within the first minute or two of the experiment.

My description makes these kids sound like professional engineers following a rigid set of protocols, but the truth is that this is just the most fun way to go about solving the problem. In fact, this is where play and productivity meet one another.

Kids play around when they’re trying to solve the problem of stacking things. That’s because they’ve never seen this exact problem before, so trying little solutions to each of the challenges as they come up is the way to go.

The well-trained adults, by contrast, have lots of tools in their box for solving problems like these. They have a well developed sense of logic and a good understanding of geometry, and they’re eager to use these powerful tools to plan their approach.

The only problem is that you can only plan as far ahead as you can predict. Play, by contrast, allows you to imagine that whatever it is that you’re going to try just might work. You can sort of ignore the nagging disbelief and just run the low-probability experiment anyway.

Something else happens as we grow up, too. We lose this innocence kids feel, and we don’t feel like we have permission to be curious about certain things. Don’t be silly, we think to ourselves.

We become afraid to make mistakes in front of other people. Sometimes, we even become afraid to make mistakes in front of ourselves.

In doing so, we ignore the iterative approach to solving problems. We close the doorway to the absurd, where so many potential solutions lie.

There is hope for us adults! Lots of us have figured out ways to keep this connection to our youth alive, and I’ve seen the iterative approach in jiu jitsu drilling and rolling, where you can only get better by making mistakes.

When adults start to play like this, I see their eyes light up. They might be experiencing something they haven’t felt since they were little, around the age of those little marshmallow-fiddlers we were talking about earlier.

Have you found a place where you can fiddle around? Are you working on your 10,000 hours of mastery, or just having fun with a hobby where you can use the iterative approach to solve puzzles or challenges?

And, what is it about marshmallow experiments that makes me want to write so much?