The Uncertainty Mindset by Vaughn Tan

Author:Vaughn Tan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC026000, Social Science/Sociology/General, BUS085000, Business & Economics/Organizational Behavior
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2020-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

PROTOTYPING TOWARDS INNOVATION

As with strawberry/beet, innovations are rarely perfected on the first attempt. Most dishes in high-end restaurants consist of many components (sauces, proteins, starches, garnishes, and such), each of which must be developed separately and then combined in the final plated dish. Some attempts are needed to figure out the general direction—what components should be in the dish and how they should relate to each other. A few attempts for each of the components to figure out what their respective directions should be, and a few more to hone them to a satisfactory level of refinement. Yet more attempts to bring the components together so the plated dish tastes good, is easy to eat, and can be plated reliably. The development process Varela used for strawberry/beet was characteristic of how all the teams did R&D. They moved every project along by creating successive actual prototypes and evaluating them internally, using the feedback from each prototype to inform the next iteration. This was true regardless of whether the R&D was aimed at creating a new dish, a new piece of cooking equipment, a new ingredient, or a new cooking process.3

Spending so much time and effort on the interplay of textures and flavors in a single dish may seem overwrought, but is necessary for innovation in high-end, cutting-edge cuisine. Every R&D chef has at least one war story of a stubborn project that had to be permanently shelved because some component resisted refinement. Strawberry/beet was a relatively simple dish with only four components; some dishes at Amaja have ten to fifteen components, and those components themselves frequently contain multiple components. The more components in a dish, the more attempts it takes before a new recipe is ready for guests.

As strawberry/beet illustrates, iterative prototyping often involves running into apparent and actual dead-ends, usually unexpected. Chefs developing new recipes loop back and forth repeatedly between experimenting at the component level and the level of the finished dish. This is unavoidable because the components and the finished dish mutually affect each other. The overall direction of the dish might have to change if one of the components resists refinement, and vice versa.

For Varela, the two-steps-forward-three-steps-back quality of the process made the final successful prototype an unexpected moment of minor triumph. After the tasting several weeks later during which strawberry/beet was approved, I stayed with Varela to help him pack up and get ready to leave the houseboat. “After all those rounds and getting all that feedback, I thought I might have finally nailed this one,” he said, “but I couldn’t be sure until I saw that everyone else thought so too. A fucking relief is what it is.”

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