Ep. 217 - Vaughn Tan, Author of The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation insights from the frontiers of food

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Vaughn Tan. Vaughn is the author of the new book, The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation insights from the frontiers of food.  Vaughn and I talk about his well-researched account of how some of the world's top chefs and their teams approach culinary innovation and what it means for innovation teams of all kinds. Let's get started. 

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics,  and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. 

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest today. We are talking to Vaughn Tan. Vaughn is an assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at University College London, School of Management, previously worked at Google in California has a Harvard PhD and he's author of a new book called The Uncertainty Mindset:  Innovation insights from the frontiers of food. Welcome to the show, Vaughn.

Vaughn Tan: Fantastic. Thanks for having me. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to talk about this topic of innovation in the culinary space. Restaurants have been around forever. And when you think of innovation, you don't always think restaurants and culinary space. And so I wanted to dig into this particular topic. Maybe you could tell the audience a little bit about your eclectic background. 

Vaughn Tan: Absolutely. I'm from Singapore originally. And so I guess it's kind of like a trope that if you're a Singaporean, you have an unhealthy interest in food.  This is more or less true. That kind of only started to show up in my research a little bit later. I think where I got interested in the questions I'm asking in the book, it actually started when I was working at Google. 

When I was there, one of the most interesting things that I noticed, I was there for about three years, was that the really interesting groups that came up with really innovative ideas we're the ones that weren't sort of organized the way management, conventional wisdom, would say you should organize the innovation group. They were the ones that bubbled up from the ground up. People found each other. The goals were kind of like amorphis and  shifting a lot. The themes that eventually showed up in the book.

I first noticed in an inchoate way, when I was working at Google.  When I went back to get my PhD, I was interested in finding out more about how organizations could do something like what I saw at Google. Create this environment in which people and teams could self create projects that resulted in innovation. And when I was doing the research, everyone who tries to do like a research project for a PhD, you have to chose your setting. You have to choose the site that you will go look at trying to understand more about the phenomenon that you're interested in. A lot of people who study innovation, will study things like a microchip foundary or something like that.

I just sort of, I thought initially, maybe I should try something, which is a little bit weird. What I always tell people is there's tons of reasons why restaurants and food R & D are good place to study innovation. The biggest one is that if you study food R & D the cycle time for innovation is very short.

So as a researcher, what you see is you see many, many cycles that you can start to see patterns across all those cycles. But actually the true reason, which is not less good, it's just also a good reason for it is that it's just much more fun. You know, studying chefs, being in restaurants, being in a kitchen where they're coming up with new ideas and food and constantly failing is just more fun than watching people code all the time and looked at both. So I can say that. 

And it's not to say that programming or hardware design is less interesting. It's just less fun to me. That's why I did it. My personal background is connected to why I decided to do this. Because I think it's an inherently interested in food and interested in how it gets made. I would not have thought about doing it in this way. But a lot of the reasons why I'm looking at food are actually the same reasons that initially drove me to do a PhD in the first place. And they were the same things I saw when I was working at Google. 

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about some of the examples and how you went about learning some of this stuff. So you've worked with some of the world's top chefs and their teams and looked at how they approached innovation. Did they look at it as innovation, the stuff that they were doing, or tell us a little bit about that. 

Vaughn Tan: I think they absolutely thought of it as innovation, or at least they thought about it as trying to come up with new things. And I think most of them, even though they would not maybe have used the same words as I'm using, they would have thought of it as trying to come up with a new approach, either at the level of the dish, trying to come up with the new dish or in some cases in new idea of what service should be like the entire experience of going into a restaurant. 

Some of these teams were interested in new ways of cooking. Some of them were interested in developing new materials in the sense of new ingredients. They were always thinking about it as innovation and thinking about innovation as something that could happen at several different levels that can be combined of course, but they were always thinking of what they were working on as trying to come up with new things.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about the book itself. It's called the Uncertainty Mindset. How does that come into play this idea of uncertainty in the innovation process and what did you learn? 

Vaughn Tan: I think the big takeaway point that I want everyone to come away from the book with is that innovation is often thought of as something which companies must do in order to survive and thrive and all that other stuff. Everybody knows it. But the thing which is also true about innovation, which people sort of conveniently forget all the time, is that if you are truly going to make something which is brand new, you have no idea what that is at the beginning. Not a precise idea anyway. And you also don't have a clear idea of how you're going to get there. 

Innovation as a process and as an outcome is probably the only kind of activity that we do in a corporate context that is unavoidably and inevitably inherently and uncertain activity. That's sort of the big framing for the book, which is if you're trying to do something inherently uncertain, the way you think about how you do things, what the constraints on your actions are, what the resources are that are available to you. Even what you're trying to do in the first place, like at a very fundamental level. All those things have to be appropriate for something which is uncertain and that's where the uncertainty mindset comes in. 

So the uncertainty mindset is basically a way of thinking about the world ...