I recently spent a day with one of my clients in Virginia. The main purpose of my visit: to interview their marketing and technology teams, learn about their current business-practices, and discuss their future goals and aspirations. All with the intention of making recommendations around the people, process, and technologies needed to maximize the firms’ potential.

I decided to start the day with a challenge that I first learned about from TED speaker Tom Wujak of Autodesk (to see TED talk, click here).

I broke meeting attendees up into teams of 2 or 3 people. Each team was then given 3 ft of tape, 3 ft of string, as much dry spaghetti as they wanted and a marshmallow.

The Challenge: In 15 minutes and using only the materials provided, build a free standing structure that can support the weight of the marshmallow on top. The team with the tallest structure wins.

The Result: The results were conclusive.  Teams that spent most of their time talking about how and what to build instead of actually building did not perform well (and in most cases didn’t assemble a structure in the allotted time at all). Teams that started building right away and iterated their designs together performed well/won.

Though admittedly a study of one, I parallel the results of this spaghetti & marshmallow challenge to Bluewolf’s agile approach, why it works, and how much better outcomes can be through iteration.

As leaders in Agile Business Transformation, we’ve proven this point thousands of times (without the need for spaghetti and marshmallows). The fact is that cloud technologies like Salesforce, Eloqua, Marketo, and many others are allowing businesses to spend less time thinking about how to implement their technology and more time thinking about how to implement and perfect their business — all while happening rapidly, iteratively, and at a fraction of yesteryear’s’ cost.

Ross Bauer leads Bluewolf’s Marketing Solutions practice and has over 15-years of digital media, marketing, and e-commerce experience.