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The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation Insights from the Frontiers of Food
Innovation is how businesses stay ahead of the competition and adapt to market conditions that change in unpredictable and uncertain ways. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, high-end cuisine underwent a profound transformation. Once an industry that prioritized consistency and reliability, it turned into one where constant change was a competitive necessity. A top restaurant’s reputation and success have become so closely bound up with its ability to innovate that a new organizational form, the culinary research and development team, has emerged. The best of these R&D teams continually expand the frontiers of food―they invent a constant stream of new dishes, new cooking processes and methods, and even new ways of experiencing food. How do they achieve this nonstop novelty? And what can culinary research and development teach us about how organizations innovate?
Vaughn Tan opens up the black box of elite culinary R&D to provide essential insights. Drawing on years of unprecedented access to the best and most influential culinary R&D teams in the world, he reveals how they exemplify what he calls the uncertainty mindset. Such a mindset intentionally incorporates uncertainty into organization design rather than simply trying to reduce risk. It changes how organizations hire, set goals, and motivate team members and leads organizations to work in highly unconventional ways. A revelatory look at the R&D kitchen, The Uncertainty Mindset upends conventional wisdom about how to organize for innovation and offers practical insights for businesses trying to become innovative and adaptable.
Vaughn Tan opens up the black box of elite culinary R&D to provide essential insights. Drawing on years of unprecedented access to the best and most influential culinary R&D teams in the world, he reveals how they exemplify what he calls the uncertainty mindset. Such a mindset intentionally incorporates uncertainty into organization design rather than simply trying to reduce risk. It changes how organizations hire, set goals, and motivate team members and leads organizations to work in highly unconventional ways. A revelatory look at the R&D kitchen, The Uncertainty Mindset upends conventional wisdom about how to organize for innovation and offers practical insights for businesses trying to become innovative and adaptable.
- GenresNonfictionFoodBusiness
304 pages, Hardcover
Published June 5, 2020
45 people are currently reading
283 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 10, 2022
The parallel between the most popular chefs, their R&D labs, their ventures, and the business of creativity and innovation is powerful. The book contains many sources of inspiration to understand the difference between risk and uncertainty and how to face the exponential acceleration of complexity in our world.
The big problem with this book is that it could have been written in one third of the pages. It's redundant. Concepts are repeated many times, some times in the same few pages the author tell the exact same things using different words: two times, three times in a row.
Moreover, thing I would have considered positive if not exaggerated, there are short recaps and summaries at the end of each chapter. Plus, the final pages are summarizing, once again the essence of the message.
I appreciate this work but it's not well written and it made me waste a lot of time reading redundant parts (see the boredom of going through the same things, again and again? Think +200 pages).
In addition, unfortunately, I bought also the audible version who has a poor narration. I could not stand listening to this writing style with a ro-bo-tic, almost stuttering voi-ce.
Besides these poor production aspects, the message in the book is compelling, stimulating and enriching.
5 stars for the content.
2/3 stars for the production.
The big problem with this book is that it could have been written in one third of the pages. It's redundant. Concepts are repeated many times, some times in the same few pages the author tell the exact same things using different words: two times, three times in a row.
Moreover, thing I would have considered positive if not exaggerated, there are short recaps and summaries at the end of each chapter. Plus, the final pages are summarizing, once again the essence of the message.
I appreciate this work but it's not well written and it made me waste a lot of time reading redundant parts (see the boredom of going through the same things, again and again? Think +200 pages).
In addition, unfortunately, I bought also the audible version who has a poor narration. I could not stand listening to this writing style with a ro-bo-tic, almost stuttering voi-ce.
Besides these poor production aspects, the message in the book is compelling, stimulating and enriching.
5 stars for the content.
2/3 stars for the production.
July 30, 2021
A truly phenomenal book that just happens to be delicious to read.
July 21, 2024
Vaughn Tan's The Uncertainty Mindset is unusual in that it studies innovation and the uncertainty inherent in that by looking not at some corporate firm, but by looking at culinary innovation teams: The Cooking Lab (publishers of Modernist Cuisine); the Fat Duck's Experimental Kitchen; the ThinkFoodGroup; the MAD Foundation (spun off from Noma) and Amaja in southern Argentina and the Patagonia Food Lab (the latter two are pseudonyms).
Tan notes that as an organisational sociologist studying innovation teams, he was "steeped in conventional management theory that emphasises carefully designing R&D teams so they contain the correct people, providing them with the correct resources, and identifying the correct targets for innovation work." By contrast, what he found in the culinary innovation teams he studied challenged his mental model; these teams had a very different approach to choosing what they would work on, how to work, how to find new members and how to motivate them, given that they could not predict the future.
Even if you're not really into organisational development, if you're a foodie who loves reading behind the scenes books about the culinary world, The Uncertainty Mindset is well worth a read for the glimpse it offers into the workings of restaurants like Noma, the Fat Duck, Amaja and ThinkFoodGroup's Jaleo. What it takes to create a new dish and put it in service. All the things that need to be worked out and sorted out before a new restaurant opens. The Fat Duck's 2015 radical revamp of its menu.
Like how Vaughn breaks down the different ways in which high end culinary teams make new dishes. Improving existing methods (incremental innovation) is one way. Applying methods or ingredients from a different context (knowledge translation) is another, like Amaja's efforts to create new flavours and possibilities from Patagonian ingredients, such as figuring out how to make miso from local ingredients. Combining existing methods and ingredients in new ways (combinatorial innovation) is a third. And finally creating a new way to explain the dish to the customer (narrative innovation). Creating a new dish often requires culinary R&D teams to use different combinations of these strategies at different times.
Plus you get to learn lovely new nuggets (at least they were new to me) like how sushi chefs recognise "yellow tail as one of a group of fish species called shusse-uo, in which each species of fish is given several different names to clearly distinguish among its different flavours and uses at different ages."
But for the devoted reader of OD texts, Tan does highlight the insights and lessons from culinary innovation teams that can be applied to other contexts. He notes that "culinary innovation is more like innovation in other industries (including software) than it may at first appear. Innovations fundamentally change how people, organisations, or industries do things, and they exist on a continuum between being technical or sociocultural. At the technical end of the continuum are functional innovations grounded in material processes and discoveries [like new ways of fermenting dough]….At the sociocultural end of the continuum are innovations that are aesthetic and that change social norms and preferences [like new combinations of flavours]."
Uncertainty can take two forms - risk and uncertainty. Risk 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….risk is a type of uncertainty that can be measured, quantified, then eliminated by a calculated strategic action." By contrast, there is true uncertainty that cannot be measured and cannot be eliminated using strategies chosen based on likelihoods of outcomes. Complexity and interconnectedness increase the likelihood that a system will behave in a truly uncertain way. Tan warns that we must be careful not to mistake true uncertainty for risk. Yet, he notes that uncertainty also represents an opportunity for innovation; "where the future is uncertain, people and organisations have the freedom to influence what it becomes….[teams can] explore and seek new information in an attempt to change the world and guide how it would change".
INSIGHT 1: Modular, provisional roles lead to adaptable organisation members.
On selecting people for innovation work, Tan notes that "conventional management practice emphasizes how important it is to be as detailed as possible about a job specification then to find the person best matching that specification to fill the job. Though not often mentioned, the implicit assumption is that the job specification shouldn't change". In culinary innovation teams, however, he noticed that they tended to treat the role as "provisional, unstable, and open to change. It was always clear on both sides that the title was one thing and the actual role…what part [the individual] would play in relation to others in the team - was another thing entirely." JDs are appealing because "nearly everyone instinctively wants the certainty of knowing what to do and when to do it"; but on an innovation team, where the work is inherently uncertain, a JD merely capture a "static snapshot" or a person's work. Instead, for a team to be adaptable, its members must be willing and able to adjust what they do as demands on the team change. Tan muses that it may be better to think of jobs as modular, comprising "a collection of role-components, each representing some responsibility or ability, the composition of which can and should change over time".
INSIGHT 2: Continually adjusting member roles leads to responsive, adaptable, high-performing organisations.
On how to continually adjust roles, Tan observes that in culinary innovation teams, there were "frequent microtests" through routine work that allowed team members to test their ability and show their competence in particular tasks. Because these microtests were small and frequent, they were relatively low stakes and low stress. And they allowed for job roles to evolve gradually, where people could pick up new responsibilities they had demonstrated competence in, and conversely drop those responsibilities they were less competent in compared to their team members. The low stakes and transparency of the microtests also meant that there was less contestation and turf guarding when responsibilities evolved. Tan argues that "treating all work as a testing opportunity sounds inefficient, but it isn't…it is in fact extraordinarily elegant to use work that would have been done anyway as a way to continually monitor and update how the team is structured and what its members do….a multitude of microtests quickly created detailed, accurate and validated understanding of each member's numerous and often inarticulatable skills and inclinations." Given that tests were done in public and participated in by multiple team members, there was "socially validated, shared evidence of individual competence".
INSIGHT 3: Choosing to pursue open-ended goals permits and encourages familiar innovation
INSIGHT 4: Organisation members learn how to pursue open-ended goals by doing actual and consequential work.
On what innovation teams would work on, Tan describes the conventional wisdom as having teams with "clear and stable shared goals to coordinate their work effectively, so that they don't work at cross-purposes. Aiming to produce novel work interferes with this because team goals become impossible to fully and clearly define in advance. Requiring new work to be consistent with open-ended style adds a further challenge: every team member must have a similarly detailed understanding of the team's style to be able to work effectively together."
So culinary innovation teams tend learn vicariously on what the team's style is through frequent, iterative interactions and feedback. Team members "interacted and consulted with their colleagues repeatedly in a loose, largely unprogrammed way as they prototyped their individual projects…learning happened as an unintentional result of how team members gave and received prototype feedback during these interactions. Instead of isolating teaching and learning in formal training programmes, these teams spread it across almost every piece of work each member did." And the feedback team members received tended to focus much less on process than on outcome; Tan highlights that "effective feedback in a diverse innovation team clearly identifies the desired final outcome while leaving the recipient free to choose the path he or she will take to get there….Outcome-focused feedback is necessarily vague and ambiguous about what the recipient should do next, whereas process-focussed feedback tends to be quite clear and specific about this." Yet, the outcome focussed feedback is also very clear and concrete in what the desired outcome should look like (e.g. I want the soup to be lighter in texture vs I want to soup to have the same lightness and slight graininess as the gazpacho you made last week).
INSIGHT 5: Innovation work is best motivated not with carrots, but with well-chosen sticks
INSIGHT 6: Carefully designed progressive overload pushes organisations to adapt and innovate
On motivating individuals, Tan notes that while innovation teams know that failure is essential for innovation, human nature makes them reluctant to try things that might fail. Innovation teams therefore 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". Vaughn called it creating "desperation by design", where teams are forced by desperation to achieve things they would initially thought impossible. Or more accurately, "designing for productive desperation". Tan cautions, however, that desperation by design probably only makes sense for teams tasked to innovate and do new and unfamiliar things. For other teams whose goals are clearly specified and understood in advance and where the actions taken to achieve these goals are also specific and clearly understood, then the best way to motivate the team is to tie rewards to the output and train them in the actions known to be needed. Artificially injecting desperation here is counterproductive.
Tan notes that as an organisational sociologist studying innovation teams, he was "steeped in conventional management theory that emphasises carefully designing R&D teams so they contain the correct people, providing them with the correct resources, and identifying the correct targets for innovation work." By contrast, what he found in the culinary innovation teams he studied challenged his mental model; these teams had a very different approach to choosing what they would work on, how to work, how to find new members and how to motivate them, given that they could not predict the future.
Even if you're not really into organisational development, if you're a foodie who loves reading behind the scenes books about the culinary world, The Uncertainty Mindset is well worth a read for the glimpse it offers into the workings of restaurants like Noma, the Fat Duck, Amaja and ThinkFoodGroup's Jaleo. What it takes to create a new dish and put it in service. All the things that need to be worked out and sorted out before a new restaurant opens. The Fat Duck's 2015 radical revamp of its menu.
Like how Vaughn breaks down the different ways in which high end culinary teams make new dishes. Improving existing methods (incremental innovation) is one way. Applying methods or ingredients from a different context (knowledge translation) is another, like Amaja's efforts to create new flavours and possibilities from Patagonian ingredients, such as figuring out how to make miso from local ingredients. Combining existing methods and ingredients in new ways (combinatorial innovation) is a third. And finally creating a new way to explain the dish to the customer (narrative innovation). Creating a new dish often requires culinary R&D teams to use different combinations of these strategies at different times.
Plus you get to learn lovely new nuggets (at least they were new to me) like how sushi chefs recognise "yellow tail as one of a group of fish species called shusse-uo, in which each species of fish is given several different names to clearly distinguish among its different flavours and uses at different ages."
But for the devoted reader of OD texts, Tan does highlight the insights and lessons from culinary innovation teams that can be applied to other contexts. He notes that "culinary innovation is more like innovation in other industries (including software) than it may at first appear. Innovations fundamentally change how people, organisations, or industries do things, and they exist on a continuum between being technical or sociocultural. At the technical end of the continuum are functional innovations grounded in material processes and discoveries [like new ways of fermenting dough]….At the sociocultural end of the continuum are innovations that are aesthetic and that change social norms and preferences [like new combinations of flavours]."
Uncertainty can take two forms - risk and uncertainty. Risk 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….risk is a type of uncertainty that can be measured, quantified, then eliminated by a calculated strategic action." By contrast, there is true uncertainty that cannot be measured and cannot be eliminated using strategies chosen based on likelihoods of outcomes. Complexity and interconnectedness increase the likelihood that a system will behave in a truly uncertain way. Tan warns that we must be careful not to mistake true uncertainty for risk. Yet, he notes that uncertainty also represents an opportunity for innovation; "where the future is uncertain, people and organisations have the freedom to influence what it becomes….[teams can] explore and seek new information in an attempt to change the world and guide how it would change".
INSIGHT 1: Modular, provisional roles lead to adaptable organisation members.
On selecting people for innovation work, Tan notes that "conventional management practice emphasizes how important it is to be as detailed as possible about a job specification then to find the person best matching that specification to fill the job. Though not often mentioned, the implicit assumption is that the job specification shouldn't change". In culinary innovation teams, however, he noticed that they tended to treat the role as "provisional, unstable, and open to change. It was always clear on both sides that the title was one thing and the actual role…what part [the individual] would play in relation to others in the team - was another thing entirely." JDs are appealing because "nearly everyone instinctively wants the certainty of knowing what to do and when to do it"; but on an innovation team, where the work is inherently uncertain, a JD merely capture a "static snapshot" or a person's work. Instead, for a team to be adaptable, its members must be willing and able to adjust what they do as demands on the team change. Tan muses that it may be better to think of jobs as modular, comprising "a collection of role-components, each representing some responsibility or ability, the composition of which can and should change over time".
INSIGHT 2: Continually adjusting member roles leads to responsive, adaptable, high-performing organisations.
On how to continually adjust roles, Tan observes that in culinary innovation teams, there were "frequent microtests" through routine work that allowed team members to test their ability and show their competence in particular tasks. Because these microtests were small and frequent, they were relatively low stakes and low stress. And they allowed for job roles to evolve gradually, where people could pick up new responsibilities they had demonstrated competence in, and conversely drop those responsibilities they were less competent in compared to their team members. The low stakes and transparency of the microtests also meant that there was less contestation and turf guarding when responsibilities evolved. Tan argues that "treating all work as a testing opportunity sounds inefficient, but it isn't…it is in fact extraordinarily elegant to use work that would have been done anyway as a way to continually monitor and update how the team is structured and what its members do….a multitude of microtests quickly created detailed, accurate and validated understanding of each member's numerous and often inarticulatable skills and inclinations." Given that tests were done in public and participated in by multiple team members, there was "socially validated, shared evidence of individual competence".
INSIGHT 3: Choosing to pursue open-ended goals permits and encourages familiar innovation
INSIGHT 4: Organisation members learn how to pursue open-ended goals by doing actual and consequential work.
On what innovation teams would work on, Tan describes the conventional wisdom as having teams with "clear and stable shared goals to coordinate their work effectively, so that they don't work at cross-purposes. Aiming to produce novel work interferes with this because team goals become impossible to fully and clearly define in advance. Requiring new work to be consistent with open-ended style adds a further challenge: every team member must have a similarly detailed understanding of the team's style to be able to work effectively together."
So culinary innovation teams tend learn vicariously on what the team's style is through frequent, iterative interactions and feedback. Team members "interacted and consulted with their colleagues repeatedly in a loose, largely unprogrammed way as they prototyped their individual projects…learning happened as an unintentional result of how team members gave and received prototype feedback during these interactions. Instead of isolating teaching and learning in formal training programmes, these teams spread it across almost every piece of work each member did." And the feedback team members received tended to focus much less on process than on outcome; Tan highlights that "effective feedback in a diverse innovation team clearly identifies the desired final outcome while leaving the recipient free to choose the path he or she will take to get there….Outcome-focused feedback is necessarily vague and ambiguous about what the recipient should do next, whereas process-focussed feedback tends to be quite clear and specific about this." Yet, the outcome focussed feedback is also very clear and concrete in what the desired outcome should look like (e.g. I want the soup to be lighter in texture vs I want to soup to have the same lightness and slight graininess as the gazpacho you made last week).
INSIGHT 5: Innovation work is best motivated not with carrots, but with well-chosen sticks
INSIGHT 6: Carefully designed progressive overload pushes organisations to adapt and innovate
On motivating individuals, Tan notes that while innovation teams know that failure is essential for innovation, human nature makes them reluctant to try things that might fail. Innovation teams therefore 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". Vaughn called it creating "desperation by design", where teams are forced by desperation to achieve things they would initially thought impossible. Or more accurately, "designing for productive desperation". Tan cautions, however, that desperation by design probably only makes sense for teams tasked to innovate and do new and unfamiliar things. For other teams whose goals are clearly specified and understood in advance and where the actions taken to achieve these goals are also specific and clearly understood, then the best way to motivate the team is to tie rewards to the output and train them in the actions known to be needed. Artificially injecting desperation here is counterproductive.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 22, 2020
Torn on my rating. I enjoyed the book as it covered the food industry and the interesting things happening there (4/5). As far as "insights" into the uncertainty mindset, that portion was a bit more underwhelming (3/5); possibly because of my previous exposure to ideas through other books or experience.
April 24, 2021
As a piece of history for cutting-edge cuisine, it’s fantastic (although the pseudonymous treatment of one of the restaurants involved can be a bit frustrating). As a management theory I’m a bit less convinced - it has some valuable suggestions but seems a bit circular: being flexible in uncertain situations is good, and uncertain situations help make you flexible. I don’t disagree, though.
March 30, 2024
Some interesting ideas about how to foster and enable innovation. Lots of interesting anecdotes about innocation innovation in the high-end cuisine industry. Could have done with some more thought and insight into applications of ideas.
Want to read
February 10, 2021Andy M's rec: https://www.patreon.com/posts/43912546
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