When I was a kid on Thanksgiving, I’d always feel bad for my mom who had to cook all the dishes, mostly alone. On the outside it looks like a chore. And in some ways it is, but having been the Thanksgiving chef a few times now, there’s some satisfaction to coordinating it all.
I recently read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, and it only just dawned on me the scope of the chef’s true job in the kitchen. They’re not just figuring out the recipes – they’re coordinating the flow of the kitchen, ensuring ingredients are on hand, putting out fires. There’s satisfaction (and stress) to running a kitchen, just like there is to leading any team or operation.
But perhaps the biggest lesson is that a kitchen is not an assembly line operation. It’s a balance of independent vs interdependent processes. There’s not enough prep space, and certainly not enough oven space to build dishes one after another. Instead, to make sure you’ve got everything plated on time, you’ve got to piece dishes along side one another, each their own independent process happening in parallel.
We tend to idealize efficient work in the opposite though: Team 1 must complete task A before team 2 can complete task B. How much more time and headache could be spared by keeping these processes as independent as possible. What’s the maximum amount of work that can be done independently, and how much can you minimize the waiting game?