Netflix & Skill presents... Chef

Some of you who follow or interact with me a little will know that I'm a big fan of cinema, and over the years I have been building a catalogue of films that teach me a lot about agility, business, and how to be better in the world. Obvious right? I mean that's what the art form does.

Throughout 2021, with my current client, I have curated a SharePoint site space that presents one of these movies every Friday to see if the gang enjoy the suggestions. MAybe they are struggling to think of something to watch this weekend. We all know that endless searching for a movie on our streaming channels. Anyhoo, I thought I'd start to share these movie selections here too to see what you think.

This week I offered up a big hit in my house... (my mum and dad were restauranteurs, and my dad, a great systems thinker, studied under Peter Checkland).... Chef:

The first thing to consider here is the context. A kitchen and running a restaurant is a complex adaptive place. The work is frenetic, the feedback loops are immediate, and for something a sensory as food, of coursethe emotional connection to the product runs high. So I put it to you that what you witness in a restaurant can be applied to any other service industry but in a restaurant it is easier to spot…and this makes Chef a great movie to learn from…maybe, dare I say it, more than my beloved Moneyball in its sporting setting.

Chef introduces Carl Casper, El Jefe, a cook who has seemingly lost touch with his purpose and growth…scaling has put pressures on him that he is struggling to cope with.

Scaling can bring about problems and introduce behaviours that change our focus from delivering what people want, to delivering what the scaling activity now demands of us…to a point where we, and the important people around us, find it hard to recognise us.

Something to consider about the downsides of scaling too big, too soon… when we were delivering what people want, we knew we were the right person because we were good at it, and they always wanted it. As we scaled and the priorities associated with scaling took over, we not only noticed that we were doing fewer of the things that met our customer needs, and gave us fulfilment and satisfaction, but we also discovered we were not good at meeting the demands of the scaling process….and now we are doubly miserable. In fact, so are many of our team mates and morale is plummeting.

It is useful to think about Carl’s journey and the patterns and anti-patterns described in the book Sooner, Safer, Happier (by Jonathan Smart, Zsolt Berend, Myles Ogilvie and Simon Rohrer)

When the pressures of scaling (going up market and sophisticated!) finally take their toll, Carl with the encouragement of his son’s mother, de-scales everything and goes back to basics.

He goes back to the practice of practicing what he is good at, and the thing that raised him to the lofty heights he has fallen from.

As you can imagine there is the usual Hollywood “Hero’s Arc” so there’s no surprise that he makes it in the end, but the way he makes it, the second time around, is by remembering to keep the taste buds of the customer happy… the end user has to find your service useful for a couple of things to happen… (1) for you to be sustainable – if they don’t get it from you they will get it elsewhere. (This can happen differently in different contexts. The organisation I currently help holds the view that the user has nowhere else to get their service, but the internal users are able to disengage and make do with what they can supply themselves, which might bring some "sticking plaster" benefits for them. but also many longer term risks, and failure demand)

The patterns and antipatterns I've chosen to focus on in this transformational context are these:

AP 2.1 – its hard to move the whole organisation in one go, at the same speed. People are different and in order to learn something new they must unlearn the old things, and people learn and unlearn at different rates. Find and focus on the people who learn/unlearn and like to change quickly. When they are comfortable with doing the new thing, they can help you help the next set of transformers. (Plus in order to keep some stability in the organisation you need some people, those who are loyal to the old way, to stay where they are and offer something traditional, until there is enough of "the new" established for it, as an alternative, to be compelling)

AP2.2 – As any enthusiastic Lean Start Up practitioner or student knows…don’t try and scale until being small is your biggest problem. Excellently meet the needs of the people who are using your service, and when they start telling others that you are the best thing since sliced bread, and the others show up…then you can try and solve the problem of meeting the needs of a bigger user base. Putting effort into some speculative problem that the future might present will mean you take your eye off the ball and away from meeting the demands of the people right in front of you.

AP 2.3 – If you only do this thing you do, with people at the bottom of a hierarchy, it will only get so far. Different levels of hierarchy have different needs and concerns. They can still use what you do but they use it for different purposes. In Kanban we talk about the Agendas; Senior Managers use it for organisational survivability, Middle Managers use it to understand and improve service orientation and Operators use it for sustainability. The point is you need to bring all of those audiences along. They can’t necessarily look at each other’s transformational practice and see a compelling reason for adoption amongst themselves – this often prompts the Do As I Say, Not As I Do anti-pattern.

So what does this mean for Chef Carl?

He goes from a big expensive restaurant in Venice Beach California, and the attention of high profile restaurant critics, to a food truck he buys in Miami that he can park anywhere and only the attention of those who can smell the delicious aromas wafting towards them from down the street. He focuses on making a few things very well, and the word spreads by referral from those who had a fantastic experience. At the point where he might decide to call it a day, having learned some lessons and now able to see himself in the mirror again, he decides not to pack up and fly home. Instead, he decides to Scale Up, use technology to spread the word before him and drive the truck back across the US growing a following and customer base as he goes. He remains small, portable and nimble. He uses the limited ingredients available to him locally to set a limited menu his customer base finds appetising. (Limited WIP and User Centred Design!).

By the time he crosses the country and arrives back in Venice Beach there is enough buzz about his food, and the experience he creates, for him to set up a new restaurant. What he?learns along this “descaled” journey is that he can stay true to what he wants/needs to do, and in doing so create an experience that more than enough people will seek out to make him very successful. Putting a version of himself that is recognisable and sustainable and true, back on top. Re-establishing his why, his purpose and all the while exercising his fitness for that purpose until, well the proof is in the Cubanos… nom,nom,nom!

Many of the things we speak about amongst the WoW community are essentially simple ways of coping with complexity, so much so that people often worry about the lack of “sophistication”. Can something so simple really fix my complex problem.

Think how simple “Ikigai” is, the 4 circle model I've shared before. Or Simon Sinek's Start with Why, Golden Circle model. (You can read more about how we approach this at Sooner, Safer, Happier here with this "Start with Why; Empower the How" blog by Jon Smart)

It is encouraging that many of these models describe very similar approaches to these difficult to solve issues…and that, in our view, underlines the theme of simplicity and a compelling coherent set of successful behaviours.

We hope you enjoy Chef as much as we have, and apologies if you fall off your Summer beach body diet because of it.

Chef is available on Amazon Prime

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2883512/