What I learned from a cooking show
I was watching a cooking show the other night, and two chefs were handed the same challenge. One failed completely, his kitchen became total chaos, tickets backing up, plates going out cold. The other chef killed it effortlessly. The difference wasn’t skill, the second chef planned his line before anyone touched a knife.
It got me thinking about how we run creative teams.
Mapping the station to the menu
Any chef who has survived a brutal dinner rush knows you don’t make it through by throwing ten random bodies into a kitchen and telling everyone to start chopping.
A kitchen line is built for a specific menu. A three-star Michelin restaurant organizes its stations completely differently than a high-volume burger joint. If you don’t plan the crew and the flow upfront, people end up tripping over each other while the tickets pile up.
Building a creative team requires the same type of thinking. You have to look at the menu you’re serving and define who your team needs to get it done. For instance, maybe the creative team needs a senior fast-turnaround crew for campaign pitches and a completely different team of high-level thinkers hunting long-term vision for brand work.
When you define roles around your specific menu, the mechanics of how you work change instantly because the right hands are on the right station every single time.
Clear lanes, clean service
People rarely burn out from working hard on a busy day. They burn out from chaos. When four people are fighting over the same cutting board, nobody knows who owns the station, and the chef starts hovering over everyone’s shoulders asking why the tickets are not moving.
Clear lanes create a clean operation. Thinkers get the quiet space required to crack a hard problem, and creators get protected, uninterrupted blocks of time to execute. Most importantly, clear lanes give you an unvarnished look at which station is held up and why.
Know the menu you’re serving, map the stations, and give your people the room to own their line.
