Subtract.
He wrote the word on some masking tape, and stuck it on the bench in front of the chef.
“That’s how you do better.”
It’s a scene out of the tv show “The Bear” where the central character, Carmy, a tortured top chef, is flashing back to his traumatic experiences working in one of the best restaurants in the world. His head chef boss, who’d repeatedly bullied him with verbal and emotional abuse, had finally approved of Carmy’s work, after demanding he reduce the amount of elements involved in the dish he was working on.
“That’s how you do better.”
In the pursuit equation for better outcomes, adding things seems good doesn’t it? Identify what you think will help, source it, resource it, and include it. More ideas honoured, more intelligence exercised, more dimension, more built, more confidence.
More.
But doing less and taking away, to do better? What might be the equation for that? And how could that occur?
Could there be an opportunity to create excellence and full expression, within the existing elements?
Going deeper to express more. Deeper within yourself, your people, the craft, the strategy, the tool, the skill. Deliberately welcoming constraints as forcing function for innovation, richness, depth of capacity and a more wholistic result. The whole being greater than the sum of it’s parts.
Arriving at better.
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” –