You have one hour. Just sixty minutes to prepare a meal for four, five courses of the highest possible quality, and with conspicuous creativity. The key ingredient comprising the meal is kept a secret until the last possible minute. While you’re used to working in a kitchen you control, surrounded by people who are trained to ensure your success, you and your team are preparing this meal in an unfamiliar location. Relatively speaking you are a novice, while the individual you are competing against is a celebrity chef of international renown for whom this type of challenge is second nature. And if these conditions aren’t stressful enough, once your meal is complete, every chef on earth will know what you’ve created, how you’ve created it, and what the judges thought. Oh, as will millions of viewers worldwide.Your reputation hangs in the balance. Failure is not an option.
How can a chef create five dishes all at the same time with this much existential overhead? Is five not a WIP-busting number?It’s the Iron Chef Paradox.
In the book
, Malcom Gladwell invokes the “10,000 hour rule,” based upon the research of sociologist Anders Ericcson that suggests if you do something for 10,000 hours you become an expert. But what does it mean to be an expert?Our brains are pattern recognition devices. The more we practice something, the more we’re able to process its intricacies efficiently and effectively. Whether it’s golf, cooking, or even empathy, practice creates proficiency.So-called “Iron Chefs” do not see five dishes in progress. They do not see a WIP-busting workload. They see one meal for one group. The meal for them is a pattern.They can see patterns foremost in the food itself. Chefs know what the current level of completeness is by sight. The food - for them - is a visual control. Simply looking at a fillet of sea bass on a grill from across the kitchen is sufficient. As it transforms from translucent to milky-white, the chef knows how close it is to done. This is known as prototype matching. As we work through those 10,000 hours, we build up a library of pattern prototypes to recognize.Understanding prototypes allows Iron Chefs to effectively prioritize under extreme duress. You put your rack of lamb on long before you plate your ice cream. Without understanding both the time and sequence of the patterns, effective prioritization is highly unlikely.Patterns are all around us, we just need to sensitize ourselves to them. We need to be aware of what we are practicing and do it purposefully. With Personal Kanban, we have a visual control and can actually practice living. In the past, we just worked. Even though we‘ve all had a lifetime of starting and (sometimes) completing tasks, we’re often oblivious to the patterns and unaware of the prototypes of our work. Without recognizing these, without understanding how our choices impact our future, our WIP limits have been strained sending our stress levels through the roof.Chefs like Bobby Flay understand the patterns and prototypes of cooking so well, they can create dessert out of tuna.What can we accomplish on a Saturday with a mixed backlog? What can we create with our colleagues at the office in a week? What patterns are there to help us recognize pitfalls and find success?
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