What’s the marshmallow challenge, you ask? It’s an idiotic team building exercise where groups of people are given 20 pieces of spaghetti, some tape and one marshmallow. The assigned task is to construct a tower out of these materials with the marshmallow at the top. This has to be completed in a specified amount of time.

There are blogs and Ted Talks devoted to this. My company has posted on our internal website about teams who have participated. The spin is that shit like this teaches collaboration and positively impacts team projects.

I wasted 10 minutes of my life watching a video of a Ted Talk about the marshmallow challenge. The conclusion of the speaker was that since the participants who took the challenge did much better on their second try six months after the first shot, the experiment succeed in teaching them how to better collaborate on a team project.

Really? It did?

How about in the absence of other data about their actual performance at work on special projects, all this proves is they learned how to better build a tower out of spaghetti and tape with a marshmallow on top?

I fucking despise corporate team building exercises. They are worthless and prove nothing.