Recipes vs Chefs

Recipes vs Chefs

A simple metaphor will allow us to understand the danger of the case based, structured approaches that have dominated the last few decades; namely that of the recipe book user and the chef. If you employ a recipe book user to cook a meal for you, then your kitchen will have to be engineered to match a standard design. All the ingredients will be lined up in appropriate sized bowls and, as long as nothing unexpected happens you will get a reasonable meal. The Chef on the other hand enters your kitchen and creates a wonderful meal from whatever happens to be lying around. This is not to say that recipe books do not have utility, or that the chef will not use them from time to time. The point is that the chef is resilient and adaptive in changing contexts; the recipe book is not. The reason for this is that, to reference Aristotle, the chef has both sophia and pronesis, the ability to reflect and the knowledge built through a long apprenticeship and an understanding of the basic principles of taste and nutrition; wisdom both reflective and practical, institutionalized in social practice and expectation.

Put bluntly, the emphasis on engineering best practice and case based approaches to management science over the last few decades has produced an over dependence on recipes, and a paucity of chefs. Rectification of this is a matter of necessity in a resource-starved future confronted by increasing levels of uncertainty and less and less time to react or intervene before events get out of hand. The purpose of this chapter however is not to declare the engineering approach apostate and establish cognitive complexity¹ as a new religious orthodoxy. Rather it is to legitimize such approaches, within the boundaries of Ordered Systems, where cause and effect relationships exist, can be discovered and which repeat. On the other side of the boundary however we have a whole new class of un-ordered² systems that require the adaptability of the chef, rather than the predictability of the recipe book.