Too many cooks: lessons in out-there design thinking (and useful drinking)
- Daniel Ospina, co-founder of Conductal, explains how his time working at Heston Blumenthal’s legendary Fat Duck kitchen helped him to think at tangents — and how you can too.
- “It dawned on us that the big innovations had come from: the process that we were using: we were getting really drunk in a pub with someone who was really far removed from our industry.”
- It’s hard to step out of your comfort zone but that’s where innovation lies. So how do you do it?
Daniel Ospina is one of those thought-leaders and entrepreneurs who doesn’t really fit the standard perception of either label. He’s a visiting lecturer on System Design at Said Business School, an Associate Fellow of London University, and co-founder of Crossmodalism — an international community which bridges the gap between artists, scientists, designers, and entrepreneurs.
As such, his ideas around design, business and research are fascinating, surprising and potentially confusing — until you understand that he’s simply aiming to encourage people to be more daring.
So when Daniel appeared at TOA, it was not only to speak about alternative practice, but to act on it too, as part of a unique Crossmodalism food-canvas performance which combined painting, food and music.
You can still buy Earlybird tickets to TOA 2017, where you’ll see groundbreaking thinking, talks, and performances like Daniel’s.
His amazing story about what he learnt from his time at the Fat Duck, how he has developed his thinking since then, and how you can apply it to change the way you think, is right here:
The problem: two too many coincidences
“In 2011, I joined the Fat Duck experimental kitchen, which is known for crazy concoctions like snail porridge, edible cards, or a watch that melts in a teapot and turns into a consommé. My job was to come up with new concepts that could trickle down through the company and the industry.
“I’d keep notes on flavour combinations I came across while I was eating dinner if I thought it was an interesting idea: and one of those was pumpkin and mandarin.
“Weeks later, a couple of guys from production said, “We have a great idea — we want to make a warm and spicy, comforting juice, because winter is coming. We want to make it with pumpkin and mandarin.” Somehow we had come up with the same idea at the same time.
“On another occasion we were working with supercooled water: where you cool water below freezing, but as there are no impurities, the water remains liquid — and then when you pour it, it freezes instantly.
“We worked on this project for about four months, thinking of a cocktail application. And we were really, really close to doing it… and at that point another restaurant in Spain released a YouTube video using that exact technique.
“Somehow a different team, in a different country, with whom we had no line of communication, had come up with the same idea at the same time.”
“We researched where the big innovations had come from. It was that we were getting really drunk in a pub with someone who was really far removed from our industry”
How? Where does innovation comes from, and how do these spooky synchronicities happen?
“Ideas happen when we take information from the environment, and create some sort of novel combination of them.
“We researched where the big innovations had come from. It dawned upon us that it wasn’t the composition of the team — it was in the process that we were using. And it was that we were getting really drunk in a pub with someone who was really far removed from our industry: a psychologist, or a chemist or a storyteller, and so on.
“So when we think about innovation it can be conceived as a dual process: on one side, there is a diverging component, where we generate a series of ideas, and on the other side we select a few to take further.
“On a conscious level, that’s very simple: we eliminate possibilities. But the System One and System Two theory says that unconsciously, we’re doing it as well.”
“When we are all looking at the same sources of information, we run the risk of coming up with a lot of the same ideas.”
Making decisions when we’re not even aware of them has a narrowing effect on the outcomes — even at the Fat Duck.
“We are not aware that we’re making choices, yet our brain makes a choice. And when we work in a team that becomes a lot more complex, because the interactions are more complicated: you need to pass information to one another.
“The problem is that we’re not rational decision makers. We tend to prioritise information that is commonly available to us, and to which we have been exposed recently. As well, we give priority to the opinions of those of our closed group.
“When we are all looking at the same sources of information, we run the risk of coming up with a lot of the same ideas.”
We’re all looking at the same stuff and coming up with the same conclusions. And it means our advances can get boring.
“This is exactly what happened at the Fat Duck: I realised a few months later that the pumpkin and mandarin flavour combination had been published in a very famous cookbook — as a dessert. And the supercooled water came from a chemistry study that had been a big trend in the industry at that time.
“The risk is that we come up with the same ideas again. How often do we hear another “Uber of X”: the Uber of Dog-Walking or Uber of Toothpaste Delivery? We have a problem.
Ultra-creative chefs have the scope to think from weird angles. How does that work with tech and entrepreneurship?
“We don’t only want a more original solution — we want something that is meaningful. We don’t want to spend the rest of our lives solving just very small problems for a very rich minority.
“Pier Luigi Luisi and Fritjof Capra have a beautiful analysis in which they explain that human thought, as a paradigm throughout history, has been swinging between two points. On one side there is holistic thinking which looks at the top first, and on the other side there is analytical thought that tends to fragment and analyse the parts.
“In that context, the “Uber of dog walking” approach is focussing on a small part of the system without looking at the whole picture. So how do we go beyond that? How do we set up a mission: a bigger cause?
“Let’s go beyond our zone of comfort and create organisations that are meaningful, and that can offer original solutions”
So how can we overcome this problem — how can we design for diversity?
“With Crossmodalism, we try to link far-apart disciplines: people who normally don’t speak to each other, like scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and designers. We add another step in the design process: we go out of it, and take it to the meta level — beyond the zone of comfort into something we have never explored before — and see how it applies to what we’re doing.
“Perhaps then when we are ideating, we can come up with different solutions to everyone around us.”
Find a cause, get people excited — and the marketplace is going to help you.
“Companies that can only leverage salaries and benefits will increasingly be at a competitive disadvantage when hiring talent compared to those that can put across something bigger. A cause can rally teams, bring crowds together and make them accept hardships to attempt crazy challenges.
“This is not easy. (That’s the bad news.) Finding an agreement within a large population takes a lot of effort and it’s a process you need to invest in from early on.
“But please do it — let’s go beyond our zone of comfort and create organisations that are meaningful, and that can offer original solutions to challenges that actually matter.”
This talk has been edited for clarity and length.
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