Squid Game for Management Professionals — Part IV

Lessons to learn from the second game about Privilege and Innovative Thinking

5 min readDec 25, 2021

The fourth article of the series extracts lessons from the second game of the competition — Sugar Honeycombs.

Sugar Honeycombs

Sugar Honeycombs is not even really a game. It is basically a candy made out of brown sugar. Street vendors in the South Korea making this candy, as shown in the TV show, serve them as cutouts of different shapes.

In the second game of the competition, players have to cut out the candy in different shapes with the help of a needle. Following variables are obviously in play here:

Difficulty: There are four options for the shape in which a player may be required to cut the candy out; circle, triangle, star and umbrella. Despite the task of cutting the candy out ensuring it remains intact being hard, it is harder to cut out the shapes with more curves, corners and thinner parts. The players are made to choose the shapes before letting them know anything about the game itself. It means that they are unaware how their choice is going to contribute to the level of difficulty of the game.
Tick-tock: A player has to cut out the intact piece of the honeycomb within ten minutes to win, or basically to survive. Countdown adds to the anxiety of the players.
Consequence of Failure: Every player is witnessing the consequence of failure, watching those who fail being killed. This impending doom is also adding to the anxiety of the players.

One thing that was once again not a variable here was the dependence of the individual victory on the defeat of others. Every player is going to survive only if they manage to complete their task successfully and the completion of their task does not require them to worry about how others are performing.

Players who keep completing their task successfully keep leaving the venue, while those failing keep dying. Some players do find ways of reducing the difficulty of the task by the use of saliva to reduce the thickness of the candy, making it easy for them to cut the shape out.

Moreover, players throughout the game keep looking around in desperation to find a way to do this task better. They eventually also start copying those who they find to be doing it right, hoping that it will get easier for this this way as well. This also happens in the first game, Red Light Green Light, but has not been emphasized upon because it was a childhood game with rules that the mot of the people were aware of already. In this game, however, since it was not really a childhood game, the tricks people use to make the task easier are innovative and therefore impressive.

Out of 187 players, 108 are able to survive. That means over 57 percent of the players make it, while only 50 percent had either a triangle or a circle.

Privilege

Once the game is revealed to the players, they are all not in the same place as far as their luck is concerned — triangle being much easier to tackle as compared to the umbrella. So certain players had a certain disadvantage before even starting the game. This is what we commonly know as privilege — the existence of favorable circumstances for individuals to benefit from an opportunity.

But do all of those who have easier shapes make it out of the game with success? Do all of those who get umbrella as a shape fail to deliver? The answer to both of these questions is “No”!

Innovative Thinking

Almost as accidental as the Fleming’s discovery of penicillin or the fall of the Newton’s apple, but definitely not similar in terms of the global impact, one of the player discovers that his sweat falling on the honeycomb candy thins it. The player then starts licking the candy to keep thinning it, especially closer to the edges of the shape marked, so that it can be cut out with a lot more convenience. Fellow players seeing him start imitating him, hoping that it will help them in the task as well — and it does!

Key Learnings

Privilege is a reality. Not everyone is equal in terms of their abilities and resources and there is no defying that. But that does not mean that success is only for the privileged. Remember:

Privilege does not guarantee success. Not all who are privileged succeed. Sometimes people are unable to acknowledge their privilege, or are not made aware of how they can use their privilege in order to be successful. Moreover, privilege also has the ability to mislead people to being overconfident and excessive pride.
Underprivilege does not guarantee failure. Just because one lacks in terms of privilege does not mean that there is no way of them being successful. It is very much possible of the ones appearing to be underprivileged to fare better than those who are privileged. In fact in his book David & Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell discusses how underprivilege and disabilities can in fact enable people to do better than the rest if they use that deficiency wisely.
Innovation can challenge privilege. The ability to think different from the masses is in itself a privilege. This can help people in making the seemingly impossible possible. Innovation has done the same for everyone since the birth of the humankind, and whatever we have today without any effort of ourselves has been bestowed upon us by the innovators of the past who have challenged the norms.

Check out the other published parts of the series:

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