The Uncertainty Mindset | Alessandro Desantis

Highlights

Despite the importance of culinary innovation today, R&D remains unusual in the food world because innovation requires failure in pursuit of success. Most people and organizations are conditioned to respond well to success and recoil from the possibility of failure—this is true for chefs as much as anyone else.3 This means that what culinary R&D teams do is poorly understood, both outside the industry and inside it.
Revolutions occur when customary ways of doing things change quickly and dramatically. These changes result from the combination of discovering new ways of working and re-examining how things have always been done.
At the technical end of the continuum are functional innovations grounded in material processes and discoveries.
At the sociocultural end of the continuum are innovations that are aesthetic and that change social norms and preferences.
Three of the most important of these are the creation of new ingredients, new cooking methods, and new kitchen processes.
For high-end cuisine today, new dishes can be made using four broad strategies: improving existing methods (incremental innovation), applying methods or ingredients from a different context (knowledge translation), combining existing methods and ingredients in new ways (combinatorial innovation), or by creating a new way to explain the dish to the customer (narrative innovation).
Unsurprisingly, chefs attracted to R&D work often have a fundamentally different mindset, one more oriented to exploration and amenable to uncertainty and failure than the mindset of chefs primarily attracted to the rush of service.
In a certain world, you have all the knowledge necessary to know exactly how the future will be.
The word risk here means that the exact future that will result is unknown, but the different possible futures are knowable in a way that allows you to plan by calculating how likely different possible futures are and taking clearly sensible actions based on those calculations.
In other words, risk is a type of uncertainty that can be measured, quantified, then eliminated by a calculated strategic action (in this case, by stockpiling sugar).
True uncertainty is a different form of uncertainty that cannot be measured and cannot be eliminated using strategies chosen based on likelihoods of outcomes.
The unknown is existentially threatening, which is why people and organizations act both rationally and instinctively to reduce or avoid it.
The more interconnected and interdependent a system is, the more likely that events in one part of the system affect the rest of it. The larger such an interconnected, interdependent system is, the more likely that more of these events happen and that their unexpected effects mutually amplify and ripple throughout.
Where a situation is uncertain in reality, believing it to merely be risky—and thus susceptible to planning—is to believe in a form of false certainty and to be, in a real sense, deluded about the state of the world.
The wide range of entrepreneurial ideas emerging within them attests to how true uncertainty produces the open space that encourages both entrepreneurship and innovation.
The team seemed to effortlessly—and with barely any active management—scan this uncertainty-filled environment, absorb, process, and integrate the problems and information it found, then balance independent and interdependent work to solve those problems.
In contrast with conventional hiring practice, which treats the role as scoped as being stable and complete, this approach to negotiated joining treated the role as provisional, unstable, and open to change.
Innovation teams know that failure is essential for innovation, yet human nature makes them reluctant to try things that might fail. Moreover, good innovation workers need the stimulation of learning new things in order to feel engaged with their work. Innovation teams need to be forced into doing things they don’t yet know how to do to keep their members happy and engaged and to be effective at innovation. Counterintuitively, projects that create desperation by design can help overcome this problem.
There’s no point being efficient and hiring for a very detailed job description if the job changes every day. That’s being efficient about the wrong things.”
Insight 1 Modular, provisional roles lead to adaptable organization members.
Danny Gledhill, the Fat Duck’s head chef at the time, said, “the ones who come with ambition, they look out for the least opportunity to move ahead. Which sounds bad but it isn’t. We want people to keep looking out for ways they can do what they want to do while doing what we need.”
One level deeper, these teams were able to work this way because each member’s role was constantly being tested and validated by everyone else. Each member ended up doing more of the things he or she was good at and fewer of the things he or she was not so good at. Team members were alert for new responsibilities that might be simultaneously useful and relevant to the changing demands on their team. Because these teams managed their role structure like this, they became self-adjusting and self-adapting.
Testing in public was essential for team members to have an accurate shared understanding of their colleagues’ abilities and responsibilities, even as those changed from test to test. The shared and public nature of the tests was also essential for individual members to definitively accept the results of tests that affected their own roles.
Insight 2 Continually adjusting member roles leads to responsive, adaptable, high-performing organizations.
Particularly in high-end cuisine, style is the distinctive thread that connects everything a particular kitchen produces—when guests experience and enjoy a restaurant’s identity, this familiar thread is what they want to return to experience again and again.
Open-ended style is the externally recognizable imprint of a group (a particular restaurant or R&D team) that results from that group’s particular configuration of priorities and problem-finding/-solving approaches.
Insight 3 Choosing to pursue open-ended goals permits and encourages familiar innovation.
Knowledge of open-ended style is inherently tacit: knowledge that cannot be put into words for easy communication.
Iterative prototyping repeatedly tested, validated, and refined team members’ knowledge of their team’s open-ended style.4 Learning tacit knowledge by putting it to use happened in combination with effective though unconventional methods of teaching style.
Open-ended style is about getting team members to understand how to make aesthetic and practical decisions consistently at the team level, while giving them the freedom to make full use of their individual differences in skills, points of view, and ways of pursuing a project.9
Insight 4 Organization members learn how to pursue open-ended goals by doing actual and consequential work.
Innovation work is best motivated not with carrots but with well-chosen sticks.
More importantly, because such desperation is clearly at odds with the stated goals of the team and the well-understood actions it has to take, it is perceptibly artificial. It may work once, or even several times, but more often it is immediately or quickly perceived as a ruse or a gimmick. This demotivates team members and weakens trust in the team’s leaders.
Open-ended style is about getting team members to understand how to make aesthetic and practical decisions consistently at the team level, while giving them the freedom to make full use of their individual differences in skills, points of view, and ways of pursuing a project.9
Insight 4 Organization members learn how to pursue open-ended goals by doing actual and consequential work.
Innovation work is best motivated not with carrots but with well-chosen sticks.
More importantly, because such desperation is clearly at odds with the stated goals of the team and the well-understood actions it has to take, it is perceptibly artificial. It may work once, or even several times, but more often it is immediately or quickly perceived as a ruse or a gimmick. This demotivates team members and weakens trust in the team’s leaders.
Rhythmic engagement in progressively more ambitious desperation projects allowed the teams to take small, then larger steps towards working in the discomfort zone—it was a way to train them to grow increasingly comfortable with discomfort and for them to gradually grow their capacity.10
Effective innovation management involves training people and designing teams to be willing and able to discard what they have become good at and become good at something else.
Organizations seem to succeed when they deliberately inject unpredictability into themselves, as these teams did by making roles open-ended and provisional, pursuing open-ended style, and committing to desperation projects.