Campfire roasted Marshmallow is a childhood classic. Everybody knows what Marshmallow tastes like… Or do they? Because, as it turns out, Marshmallow doesn’t contain any Marshmallow!

Marshmallow confection was originally made from Marshmallow root (hence the name) but as food industry was moving to mass production the original recipe was changed to utilize widely available and cheap materials such as corn starch and gelatin; Marshmallow root was expensive and not available outside of Europe nor in large quantities. All that was left of Marshmallow root in the recipe was the name, and after so long no one even remembers that Marshmallow is actually plant with a unique flavor.

This phenomena is actually quite common. When I was a kid my favorite winter drink was Sahlab - a Turkish hot drink popular across the Levant. Originally it was made from dried and ground Sahlab plant tubers, but as the plant is now a protected species and not available for mass consumption modern versions use (surprise surprise) corn starch. Another famous example is Coca Cola, which no longer contains Cocaine or Kola nuts (although it does still use Coca leaves extract, without Cocaine). Many products that were industrialized had to be changed, often loosing their original flavors and dominant components (looking at your Wonder bread). This is The Marshmallow effect: The name is still the same, but the product is very different - and after a while no one remembers that once upon a time it wasn’t so.

Management Marshmallows

The Marshmallow effect is common in management and tech as well: Agile contains no agility, DevOps contains no DevOps and SRE contains no reliability or engineering. It’s all organizational corn starch with names that had meaning a long time ago, with people who never tasted the original flavors. In itself it isn’t too bad or at least, not worse than any other organizational fad, but the use of the original names makes conversations about the real things much harder. After all, if we have “DevOps” why are you talking about cooperation between Dev and Ops? Small wonder the same concepts reemerge with a new name and branding every few years… The illusion of a solution is actively harmful to the introduction of actual solutions. To use food analogies, it’s much harder to convince someone to eat healthy when they are consuming shitload of “nutritional additives”.