3 Reasons Why Even Smart Executives Fail the ‘Marshmallow Test’
You’d think the marshmallow challenge would be a walk in the park for people who run companies, right? I mean - executives, managers, people who spend their lives planning and strategizing - surely they can handle some spaghetti sticks, tape, and a single marshmallow. But here’s the weird thing: they usually fail. Badly.
And not because they’re stupid. It’s because they do too much thinking and not enough doing. They fall into the same habits that quietly mess up a lot of projects in real life - endless planning, too much structure, not enough learning in the moment. It’s kind of funny, kind of sad, and completely relatable if you’ve ever sat through a three-hour “alignment meeting” that produced absolutely nothing.
The patterns that appear in that silly team-building game? They’re the same ones that slow down entire organizations. The same blind spots that good business consulting from Simply Counted & Tax tries to untangle - turning overly cautious, overthinking teams back into ones that actually get stuff done.
1. Overthinking Dressed Up as Progress
The first reason smart people fail is because they’re too smart. They overcomplicate. They spend forever talking about what might happen instead of just, you know, finding out. In the challenge, execs sit there debating designs like it’s the next moon landing. They assign roles, plan contingencies, maybe even start arguing about tape length. Meanwhile, the clock’s ticking and nobody’s actually built anything.
It’s the same energy as corporate over-planning - those meetings where everyone says, “We just need one more round of feedback,” and suddenly months disappear. The teams that nail it don’t think less - they just move. They test, fail, laugh, rebuild, and suddenly they’ve learned something real. There’s a kind of scrappy honesty in that. You don’t need a slide deck; you need a mess on the floor and a few lessons learned the hard way.
2. the Curse of Over-engineering
Then there’s the obsession with perfection - or what engineers politely call over-engineering. The tower looks sleek, balanced, symmetrical - and then collapses the second you add the marshmallow. It’s the same story inside big companies: layers of process, endless approvals, systems so complex you need a degree to submit a holiday request. It all looks impressive until someone actually has to use it.
The smarter the team, the more likely they are to do this. They can’t help themselves. They want to optimize, polish, refine. But at some point, the structure stops supporting creativity and starts strangling it. Real innovation often looks a bit ugly. It’s held together with tape and crossed fingers. It wobbles but it works. The best leaders know when to say, “Okay, stop making it pretty - just see if it stands.”
3. the Fear of Looking Stupid
Here’s the one nobody admits out loud: people hate failing in front of their peers. Especially people in power. So what do they do? They hesitate. They talk. They hide behind theory. They’d rather build nothing than risk looking like the person whose tower fell over first. But that fear - that quiet, invisible pressure to look competent - is what kills creativity faster than anything else.
Watch a group of kindergartners do the same task and you’ll see it immediately. They just go. No hierarchy, no ego, no fear of being wrong. They try, fail, giggle, and try again. And guess what? Their towers usually stand taller. That’s not because they’re geniuses - it’s because they don’t carry the baggage adults do. In the workplace, recreating that same fearless space takes effort. It’s why revisiting the marshmallow challenge as an exercise can be such a wake-up call. It reminds teams that failing fast isn’t embarrassing - it’s how you learn.
The Messy Truth
The marshmallow test is silly, but it’s a mirror. It shows how the habits that make people successful - caution, planning, precision - can also make them rigid, anxious, and slow. Smart executives fail not because they lack ideas, but because they forget how to experiment.
If you’re constantly polishing plans that never see daylight, maybe it’s time to get your hands dirty again. Build something wobbly. Let it fall. Learn fast, laugh a bit, and rebuild. You might just find the tower - and the team - stands stronger the second time.