7.
EMBRACE MISTAKES
“Mistakes can take us to the margins, to the unknown, the unexplored.”
Geoff Mendal is an engineer at one of the leading internet companies in the world, based in California. He fits the stereotype of a computer engineer – introverted, methodical and structured. But he also loves food to the point that it is, at times, an obsession. So he taught himself how to cook. Initially he had no idea what he was doing and he made many mistakes. With practice came competence, but cooking with competence quickly became boring. “What’s the challenge in making the same dish over and over again exactly the same way with the same results? This is not to say that doing so is unimportant, quite the contrary! Any restaurant chef will tell you that repeat customers expect their dishes to taste exactly the same as when they ordered them the last time, regardless of what is in season or the quality of the ingredients available, or the team in the kitchen doing the actual cooking.”
There are challenges to cooking the same dish the same way, every time, says Geoff. It takes tremendous skill and competence to be able to do so. “This challenge is an emotional one. I know I can make a dish I have practised hundreds of times the same way as before and meet everyone’s expectations, so why bother? There’s nothing for me to learn or improve upon if I produce it the same way every time.”
When he decided to get really serious about cooking, Geoff went to a professional culinary school at night for a year’s course. One night the class was preparing several different sauces at the same time. He mistakenly mixed up the ingredients of two of the sauces that he was prepping at his cooking station. By the time the instructor came around to observe his progress, it was too late. He pointed out Geoff’s mistake but told him to continue preparing the mistaken sauces anyway. Maybe there was a lesson to be learned.
“I expected the results to be horrific, which for one of the sauces certainly was the case. But the other sauce – which I now call the ‘Money Sauce’ – turned out to be phenomenal. I took it home to let my wife taste it and it instantly became her favourite. She pleaded with me to make it again. But I could not, as I did not remember exactly the sequence of mistakes I made to produce it. I had only the recipes for the two sauces we were supposed to make, and though I tried to swap sets of ingredients and the processes for forming them, I could not duplicate my mistake, my ‘Money Sauce’.”
It took more than three years of experimentation to ascertain what the original mistakes were, but finally he succeeded. Now he can produce the phenomenal sauce he mistakenly made in culinary school that night every time.
Geoff admits that initially he approached cooking and culinary school using an engineering mindset: understand and follow the rules and the results will be great. Yet the culinary instructors told him that he would never be a great chef if he stuck to that approach. The challenge is to break free of the rules and become comfortable in a space where the recipe means little more than the starting point of an unknown journey. “Cooking in the moment, being totally aware of what’s happening right now and quickly adapting are what makes for great dishes. Letting go of the plan is not an easy task for an engineer. I’d hate to cross a bridge built by an engineer with this mindset. But for cooking, it’s necessary and it works.”
Since graduating from culinary school, Geoff has befriended and worked with many professional chefs, usually for large catering or charity events. They are well respected and known in the industry for their great skill and delicious food and nice restaurants. Working with these chefs, Geoff has noticed that the menu plan is at best scribbled on a sheet of paper usually on the day of the event or the day before. Sometimes that plan is not provided to the team doing the cooking, rather only pieces of the plan are communicated verbally. For the most part, the team of chefs operates in a space of Not Knowing. The quantity and breadth of ingredients are well thought out – one cannot cook for hundreds of people at a lavish event without this kind of planning. But once the ordering is done, the process of actually producing the dishes is mostly in the moment. It is not uncommon to completely substitute a dish or prepare it in a way that is the opposite of how it was originally envisioned. Chefs constantly taste and adapt the dishes they are preparing. “The best food is prepared in a fashion where not knowing how it will eventually be produced or taste rules the day,” explains Geoff.
Geoff’s ability to acknowledge and value the mistakes he made opened up possibilities that he could not have envisaged before. This is in contrast to the attitude in business where mistakes are often associated with failure and low performance. A study of US hospital nursing units showed that if mistakes are approached in the spirit of learning, then the opposite can be true. The study discovered a correlation between higher documented error rates and higher perceived unit performance, quality of relationships and nurse manager leadership. The primary reason for errors being detected in the first place in the unit was the staff’s ability to discuss mistakes openly.99
At Eurostar, building a culture oriented towards learning from mistakes has been identified as a major opportunity. “Perhaps the biggest learning is for people to accept mistakes. I find that people self-police themselves and are tougher on themselves and others than any corporate policy could be. We are working on creating an attitude of accepting mistakes and learning and growing from them, which is a key to effectiveness in Not Knowing,” says CEO Nicolas Petrovic.
Prolific innovators are often very comfortable with mistakes. Thomas Edison reputedly said “I make more mistakes than anyone I know. And eventually I patent them.” The car manufacturer Toyota is known for its efficiency and high-quality systems and is studied by manufacturers the world over. One of Toyota’s systems is to hold regular meetings where people bring in their mistakes so that everyone can learn from them. The culture makes it safe for them to do so. As Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Centre for Bits and Atoms, says: “Bugs are features – violations of expectations are opportunities to refine them."