How to Fly a Horse

by Kevin Ashton

  Parker and Stone’s company, South Park Digital Studios, is a lot like Lockheed’s Skunk Works: it is part of a big corporation, Viacom; it is isolated in its own physical location; and it is capable of working almost impossibly fast. While it takes six days to make an episode of South Park, it takes six months for most other production companies to make an episode of most animated TV shows.

  In the wrong type of organization, Parker and Stone’s creative talent can quickly become destructive. In 1998, Viacom asked the two men to make a South Park movie with another one of its subsidiaries, Paramount Pictures. Parker and Stone started fighting with the Paramount executives almost as soon as production began. One of their first battles was about the movie’s rating. Parker and Stone wanted a movie with themes and language that would make it R-rated—meaning that no one under seventeen would be admitted unless they were accompanied by a parent or adult guardian. Paramount wanted a PG-13 rating—a milder movie that anyone could see, although parents would be warned that some content may be inappropriate for children under thirteen.

  Parker rebelled: “After they showed us graphs of how much more money we’d make with a PG-13, we were like, ‘R or nothing.’ ”

  Parker declared what he later called “war.” Paramount sent them tapes of trailers for the movie; Parker and Stone broke them in half and mailed them back. They sent rude faxes to everyone they knew at Paramount, including one, titled “A Formula for Success,” that said, “Cooperation + you doing nothing = success.” Parker stole the only copy of a censored promotional videotape to stop it from being broadcast on MTV. After this incident—the tape was the result of several days and nights of hard work by Paramount employees—Paramount threatened to sue Parker and Stone.

  Parker and Stone’s biggest protest against Paramount was the movie itself. They turned the film into a full-length musical about their frustration with Paramount’s attempts to censor them. In South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, the United States declares war on Canada because of a Canadian TV show with bad language; a schoolteacher tries to rehabilitate cussing children by singing a song based on The Sound of Music’s “Do-Re-Mi”; and characters say things like “This movie has naughty language, and it might make you kids start using bad words,” and “I’m sorry! I can’t help it!! That movie has warped my fragile little mind.”

  By the short-term standards of profit and loss, the Paramount—South Park collaboration was a success: the film grossed $83 million against a budget of $21 million, won awards, and Parker and co-writer Marc Shaiman received an Oscar nomination for their song “Blame Canada.” But from the longer-term perspective of building a creative organization, the project was a catastrophe, and an expensive one: despite the positive outcome, and despite owning the rights to sequels, Paramount will never be able to make another South Park movie.

  Parker told Playboy, “They couldn’t pay us enough to work with them again.”

  Stone added, “You had marketing battles, legal battles, all these battles. Even with the clout of having this huge franchise that had earned Viacom hundreds of millions of dollars, the studio did everything they could to beat us down and beat the spirit out of the movie.”

  If Parker and Stone sound childish, it is because they are childish—in the best possible way. The social skills that enable creation through cooperation—and the antisocial behavior that can result when creation is excessively controlled—are things we all have as children but that are educated out of most of us as we grow up. We develop our ability to create in groups when we develop our ability to talk, but we often lose it during our school years, and we may have lost it completely by the time we start our first job. One of the first people to discover this was a man in Belarus in the 1920s. One of the best ways to demonstrate it is with a marshmallow.

  8 | A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION

  In 2006, Peter Skillman, an industrial designer, gave a three-minute presentation at a conference in Monterey, California. He spoke immediately after former Vice President and future Nobel Prize winner Al Gore and immediately before spacecraft designer Burt Rutan. Despite the lack of time and the difficult billing, Skillman’s talk made a big impact. It described what he called “the marshmallow challenge,” a team-building activity he developed with Dennis Boyle, a founding member of the design consultancy IDEO. The challenge is simple. Each team is given a brown paper bag containing twenty sticks of uncooked spaghetti, a yard of string, a yard of masking tape, and a marshmallow. The goal is to build the tallest possible freestanding structure that can take the weight of the marshmallow. The team members cannot use the paper bag, and they cannot mess with the marshmallow—for example, they cannot make it lighter by eating some of it—but they can break up the spaghetti, string, and masking tape. They have eighteen minutes, and they cannot be holding their structure when the time is up.

  Skillman’s most surprising finding: the best performers are children aged five and six. Skillman says, “Kindergartners, on every objective measure, have the highest average score of any group that I’ve ever tested.” Creative professional Tom Wujec confirmed this: he conducted marshmallow challenge workshops more than seventy times between 2006 and 2010 and recorded the results. Kindergartners’ towers average twenty-seven inches high. CEOs can only manage twenty-one-inch towers, lawyers build fifteen-inch towers, and the worst scores come from business school students: their towers are typically ten inches high, about one-third the height of the towers built by kindergartners. CEOs, lawyers, and business school students waste minutes on power struggles and planning, leave themselves only enough time to build one tower, and do not uncover the hidden assumption that makes the challenge so challenging: marshmallows are heavier than they look. When they finally figure this out, they have no time left to do anything about it. Wujec recounts those last moments: “Several teams will have the powerful desire to hold on to their structure at the end, usually because the marshmallow, which they just placed onto their structure moments before, is causing the structure to buckle.”

  Young children win because they collaborate spontaneously. They build towers early and often rather than wasting time fighting for leadership and dominance, they do not sit around talking—or “planning”—before they act, and they discover the problem of the marshmallow’s weight quickly, when they have lots of time left to solve it.

  Why do children do this? That question is answered by the work of Lev Vygotsky, a psychologist from Belarus. In the 1920s, Vygotsky discovered that the development of language and creative ability are so connected they may even be the same thing.

  The first thing we do with speech is organize our surroundings. We name important people, like “Mama” and “Dada,” and we name important objects, both natural, like “dog” and “cat,” and man-made, like “car” and “cup.” The second thing we do with speech is organize our behavior. We can set ourselves goals, like chase the dog or grab the cup, and communicate needs, like ask for Mama. We may have had these goals and needs before we could speak, but words allow us to make them more explicit, both to ourselves and to others. When we know the word for dog, we are more likely to chase a dog, because we are more capable of deciding to do so. This is why young children chasing dogs can often be heard saying “dog” to themselves again and again. Words beget wishes. The next thing we do with speech is create: when we can manipulate a word, we can manipulate the world. Or, as Vygotsky said:

  Although children’s use of tools during their preverbal period is comparable to that of apes, as soon as speech and the use of signs are incorporated into any action, the action becomes transformed and organized along entirely new lines. The specifically human use of tools is thus realized, going beyond the more limited use of tools possible among the higher animals.

  For example, when Vygotsky’s research associate Roza Levina asked Milya, a four-year-old girl, to draw a picture of the sentence “The teacher is angry,” Milya was unable to complete the task. Levina reports what Milya said:

  “The teac
her is angry. I can’t draw the teacher. This is how she looks.” (She draws, pressing hard with a pencil.) “It is broken. It is broken, the pencil. And Olya has a pencil and a pen.” (Child fidgets on her chair.)

  Milya’s response is typical of a child in the first stage of using language—labeling her world. Her speech is not yet a system of signs that helps her achieve goals; it is a narration of the here and now.

  Anya, three years and seven months old, is younger than Milya, but she is in the next stage of development. (Another of Vygotsky’s discoveries was something we now take for granted: that children’s minds develop at different speeds.) Vygotsky put some candy on top of a cupboard, hung a stick on the wall, and asked Anya to get the candy. At first there was a long silence. Then Anya started talking about, and working on, the problem. Vygotsky reports:

  “It’s very high.” (She climbs up onto the divan and reaches for the candy.) “It’s very high.” (She reaches.) “You can’t get it. It’s very high.” (She grasps the stick and leans on it, but she does not use it.) “I can’t get it. It’s very high.” (She holds the stick in one hand and reaches for the candy with the other.) “My arm’s tired. You can’t get it. We have a tall cupboard. Papa puts things up there, and I can’t get them.” (She reaches.) “No, I can’t reach it with my hand. I’m still little.” (She stands up on a chair.) “There we go. I can get it better from the chair.” (She reaches. She stands on the chair, and swings the stick. She takes aim at the candy.) “Uh-uh.” (She laughs and pushes the stick forward. She glances at the candy, smiles, and gets it with the stick.) “There, I got it with the stick. I’ll take it home and give it to my cat.”

  The difference between Anya and Milya is one of development, not ability. Milya will soon be able to do what Anya did: use language not just to label the world but also to manipulate it in pursuit of a goal. Vygotsky did not have to ask Anya to think aloud about reaching the candy—children at her stage do that anyway. Anya’s thoughts connect to her actions because we do not manipulate the world, then describe what we did afterward. We manipulate language so we can manipulate the world.

  Language and creation are so interconnected that you cannot have one without the other. Language, in this sense, means a system of symbols and rules that allows us to make and manipulate a mental representation of past, present, and possible future states. People who prefer pictures to words, for example, still move symbols around—some of the symbols just happen to be images. Anya developed this ability relatively early; children normally move from labeling with language to manipulating with language between the ages of four and five.

  The connection between language and creating has an important consequence: once children can solve problems by talking about what they are doing, they have the basic skills they need to create with others.

  The surprising thing about the marshmallow challenge, then, is not the performance of the children but the performance of the adults. The business students who build a ten-inch tower would have built a twenty-seven-inch tower when they were in kindergarten. Where did those extra seventeen inches go? What happened to the students in the intervening years?

  The business students, like most of the rest of us, lost a lot of their capacity to cooperate. The focus on individual accomplishment in their education and environment taught them that it was more valuable to perform individual tasks, especially solving problems with definite answers, than to work on ambiguous things in teams. The natural collaborative ability they developed as children got squashed like their marshmallow towers.

  Even worse, by the time children become adults, they have learned that talking is an alternative to doing. At school, most work is done individually and quietly—especially most of the work that gets graded. One of the most common classroom rules is “No talking.” The message is clear: you cannot do and talk at the same time.

  This division between words and actions persists into the workplace, where groups solve problems by talking—or “planning”—until they agree on what they think is the one best answer, then take action. Children do not hold meetings at school; they discover them as adults, at work. Children see the marshmallow challenge as a chance to collaborate; adults treat it like a meeting. All the children in a team build and experiment, compare results, learn from one another, and create as a community as soon as the clock starts ticking. They do not discuss this in advance. They just get on with it. All the adults in a team do nothing for the first few minutes, because they are talking instead; then most of them do nothing but watch—or “manage”—someone else building a tower for the remainder of the time. According to Tom Wujec’s data, kindergartners try putting the marshmallow on the tower an average of five times during the eighteen minutes. Their first attempt usually happens between the fourth and fifth minutes. Business students typically put the marshmallow on the tower once, at the eighteenth—or last—minute.

  Vygotsky’s research explains why children act when adults plan. The connection between expression and action is stronger when we are younger. This is most obvious in experiments that involve choice. Vygotsky asked four- and five-year-old children to press one of five keys that corresponded to a picture they were shown. The children thought not with words but with actions. Vygotsky notes:

  Perhaps the most remarkable result is that the entire process of selection by the child is external, and concentrated in the motor sphere. The child does her selecting while carrying out whatever movements the choice requires. Adults make a preliminary decision internally and subsequently carry out the choice in the form of a single movement that executes the plan. The child’s movements are replete with diffuse gropings that interrupt and succeed one another. A mere glance at the chart tracing the child’s movements is sufficient to convince one of the basic motor nature of the process.

  Or: adults think before acting; children think by acting.

  Talking while acting is useful, but talking about acting is not—or, at least, not often, and not for long. This is why “Show me” is such a powerful thing to say. “Show me” stops speculation and starts action.

  Another thing adults have learned that kindergartners have not is that groups must be hierarchical. Adults start with some team members locking horns for leadership. Children start with everyone working together.

  Creative partnerships are barely hierarchical—they would not be “partnerships” if they were—so little or no energy is expended on dominance rituals. Jim Henson was senior to Frank Oz in every way but one: when Henson and Oz created together, they were equals. There is no partnership without equality. Henson and Oz did not waste their time on power struggles; they spent it all on doing, talking aloud like the children in Vygotsky’s research, solving problems, and helping each other grow. The birth of Bert and Ernie is a perfect example. Henson and Oz did not hold a meeting or make plans. They picked up the puppets and thought aloud until Bert and Ernie appeared.

  9 | WHAT ORGANIZATIONS ARE MADE OF

  In 1954, something unprecedented happened at six trials in the U.S. Courthouse in Wichita, Kansas. These were typical trials with typical cases, typical defendants, and typical convictions and acquittals. Only the heating units in the jury room were strange. They contained hidden microphones, put there by University of Chicago researchers, who used them to record the jurors’ deliberations. The judge and lawyers knew about the microphones, but the jurors did not.

  The recordings were sealed until a final judgment was entered in each case and all appeals were dismissed. Then the researchers analyzed the interactions to learn about group behavior in a jury room. When the findings were published a year later, they caused a nationwide scandal. In one of the first privacy controversies, the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security subpoenaed the researchers, and more than a hundred newspaper editorials condemned them for threatening the foundation of the American legal system.

  The scandal has been forgotten, but the method has not. Harold Garfinkel, one of the researchers who analyzed the jury room
tapes, called it “microsociology.” Scientists have now conducted thousands of experiments using microphones and video cameras to understand the human behavioral minutiae that compose society.

  One reason traditional sociology, or “macrosociology,” looks at large groups from afar over long periods of time is technological. When the social sciences were first conceived—in large part by Frenchman Émile Durkheim in the 1890s—there was no practical way to record and observe everyday interactions in detail. Microsociology became possible only in the 1950s, with the invention of the magnetic tape recorder, the transistor, and mass-production electrical microphones.

  Like traditional sociologists, business writers—often, by the way, former business school students—typically look at organizations as if they were flying high above them. They see the big picture—the mergers, changes in stock price, and major product launches that are the equivalent of the freeways, neighborhoods, and parks we see through the window of a descending airplane—but, with the exception of a few senior executives, the individuals are invisible.

  You cannot learn much by looking at an organization from the sky. Organizations exist only on the ground. They are not, as is commonly claimed, made of people. Organizations are made of people interacting. What an organization organizes is everyday human interactions.