Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Marshmallows or Gum drops?

I recently attended Awana Commander College, training for Awana Commanders (what else would it be for?).  An unexpected lesson came out of a team-building exercise.

First off, credit where credit is due.  I did not come up with this idea - it came from Texas Awana Missionary Brad Iverson ... but I'm not too proud to re-use a good analogy!

In the exercise, each team was given a bag of dry spaghetti noodles, a bag of mini marshmallows, and a bag of spice gum drops, and given 10 minutes to build the largest, most stable structure we could.  I can't say it was a conscious decision, but my team used only the gum drops, ignoring the marshmallows ... the result was that our tower not only stood the tallest, but was still standing tall 24 hours later, after the ones built with marshmallows had collapsed.