What is the difference between a meal, a good meal and a great meal? Is it all about design? Ryan Freitas writes of Cooking Lessons for Designers and highlights the similarities between (interaction) designers and cooks. He describes different sorts of projects, which struck a chord with me. They are analogous to the projects I described here.( I thought it worth repeating the necessary skills here). The daily run of cooking dishes is "Making a Movie". In addition to professional chef's skills....
The top 3 skills needed to successfully execute Making a Movie are:
1) Managing Stakeholders
2) Learning to Learn
3) Working with and Leading People
So it is the team observes and learns from itself and other people, whilst the head chef is assertively managing the staff to keep to time constraints and front of house keep the customers happy until the dishes are presented.
However if you are "flipping burgers at Wendy's" then it is Painting by numbers:
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The top 3 skills needed for this sort of project are
1) Managing Stakeholders
2) Planning and Co-ordination
3) Working with and leading people
Getting it done to the standard and getting it out there, fast.
My experience of veggie food done in a meat restaurant is that it is an afterthought done because there are a few strange customers who insist on being different so here is a quiche to keep them quiet. If we decide we would like to incorporate more vegetarian dishes into our repertoire then we might need to get out there and discover how true veggie chefs do it. This is a Quest
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The top 3 skills needed for a Quest are
1) Working with and Leading people
2) Planning and Co-ordination
3) Managing stakeholders
If however we decide to reinvent the definition of good food then we might do a "Heston Blumental"- the man who mistook his kitchen for a lab.
He and his staff go on voyages of discovery to understand what we think of as "great food" and uses scientific thought and experiment to understand the principles of creating that "great food", with the caveat that the definitions may change over time.
So as we set off we don't know what we are trying to achieve other than "great food" and we don't know how we are going to achieve it... so we are in a fog.
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The skills required are
1) Learning to learn
2) Working with and leading people
3) Managing stakeholders
Cooking food for others (staff, etc.) can be seen as a chore.. "more steaks and chips after the day I've had", or as an opportunity. "I've been playing with the steak sauce; I've put some on the side of the plate for you all...what do you think?" is an opportunity to test out a variation prior to introducing on the menu and can be regarded as a final opportunity to tweak the ingredients after analysing the feedback (is the design viable?). Or, we can use it as an opportunity to introduce something entirely new... "I've been looking at the Sushi masters and thought my version might interest you. I'd appreciate an opinion from you too as you like to try new things." This is an experiment for viability of a concept... someone finds it interesting... but if put out to the whole staff would probably bomb... what you might call the Post-it effect.... people are more resistant to change than we realise.
As we refine our Sushi.. the buzz spreads and people come to ask for a taste and asthey have heard good things they are prepared for a surprise rather than a shock. Soon someone says "we should trial Sushi one day on the menu, as a special", and before we know where we are we can't make enough of it!
Picture uploaded on by pmorgan. Used with thanks under CC.
So there is a lot to learn from studying cooking!
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