As I mentioned yesterday, almost the biggest challenge for the food innovators in Vaughn Tan’s “The Uncertainty Mindset”, is making sure that any new experience (whether a dish, a meal or an event) is both consistent with their unique ‘ethos’/’house style’/’brand’ AND completely new.

How on earth do you teach someone how to do this?

The answer is a process something like this:

• An R&D chef is given the job of producing a new dish.  There’s a brief, but no specification of method.
• The chef prototypes it, then brings it to the team for assessment and feedback.
• Together the team decide whether it has met the brief, giving constructive and concrete feedback.  “The texture is wrong, our style is more xxx”, “This ingredient overpowers the others, we’re after something more yyy”.  The most important piece of feedback is nearly always “like that zzz dish you made last month.”

These steps are repeated until the dish is judged fit to introduce to the restaurant menu.   It’s at this point that instructions for re-creating it will be set down.

The key things here are:

• Every chef does this, no matter how experienced they are or how new they are.  Everyone judges everyone’s dishes all the time.  It’s the job.
• Feedback is concrete, pointing a chef towards the outcome without ever specifying method.
• It’s a non-hierarchical and safe space.  Nobody is managing anyone else.  They are essentially peers (some more experienced than others) reviewing an output they all want to be proud of.

The result is that learning and reinforcing the unique ‘ethos’/’house style’/’brand’ becomes almost effortless, because it’s simply part of the job.   Chefs learn all the time by doing, presenting and re-presenting the results of their work for the scrutiny of their peers.

These are businesses operating under conditions of extreme uncertainty, but I think there’s something really useful here, that could and should be incorporated into a system for making and keeping promises.

Because in truth, what we really want is a system for making and exceeding promises.

After all, the Discipline is there to make Daring possible.

How would you do it?