What Grandma Knows That the Recipe Doesn't

In Why Smart and Talented People Stay Too Long, we discussed people who become exceptionally effective inside broken systems. They accumulated knowledge of exceptions, leveraged relationships and became experts at workarounds through informal mechanisms.

And how do you spot them? Easy. Watch what happens when you ask them to turn what they know into something that works without them. They may come up with a “process” that reproduces the broken system rather than remove the dependency.

I know what you are thinking, not everyone can come up with a good process. And my response would be, “If you really understand how something works, you should be able to distinguish what matters from how you happen to do it.”

The distinction to notice is whether they are solving the problem or solving around the problem.

The people who are good at building organisational capability also tend to get frustrated solving the same problems over and over again. They ask, “Isn’t there a better way to do this?” and they design solutions that handle the parts that are tedious and painful for them and others, so that they never have to see it again.

A good process allows an organisation to take something previously dependent upon an individual and make it repeatable and independent of that individual. This is progress and de-risks the business from a single point of failure. However, there is an important thing that happens in the transfer that many organisations don’t realise: They focus too much on recording the actions and forget the reasoning for it.

Consider this: An expert doesn’t merely know what to do, they know how to adapt and adjust to different circumstances and deviations to achieve the outcome that they want. But if organisations only capture a process of what to do and when, not the reasoning behind it, over time, people and organisations forget why the process is the way it is, and like a masterless servant, their answer is, “It has always been this way.”

Grandma’s curry

If you have tried learning how to cook a curry dish from your paati (Tamil for grandma) you would inevitably experience the frustration of trying to write down the recipe that seems to change every time she cooks it.

You ask: “How much of that?”

“A pinch.”

Two weeks later, you’re cooking the same dish again but her “pinch” is considerably larger, and she skipped a step or introduced a totally new step that was never seen previously. And in exasperation you point to the inconsistency and she answers, “It’s ok.”

(Oh, my freakin’ god…)

To the novice cook, her cooking would appear chaotic and inconsistent, but Grandma isn’t trying to make your life difficult. She isn’t trying to reproduce her previous actions either. She is trying to reproduce the desired state of the curry.

As an expert, she notices today’s tomatoes are less ripe. The meat has released more liquid. Or that you weren’t being careful and browned the onions a little too much. So, she’s observing the current state, intervening just the right way, then observes the change and adjusts for the desired outcome.

To the novice, cooking starts with ingredients, the amount for each, then step 1, followed by the next step and so on.

But cooking with Grandma breaks that structure and the illusion of precision.

So, the novice leans in harder:

Was that one teaspoon or two? How many minutes to cook it for? Why are you putting potato in when there wasn’t any last week?

Eventually the novice may produce a beautifully documented recipe, meticulously recording what Grandma did on that occasion, and still fail to reproduce the dish the way Grandma makes it.

The recipe is accurate, but it does not capture what Grandma knows and that is exactly what organisations do when they turn expertise into process. They observe the expert’s actions because they are visible and recordable. But expertise goes deeper and that is what the process fails to capture.

It has always been this way

Imagine the first generation understands why the recipe is the way it is; they know how to take advantage of what is in season and substitute what is scarce. The second generation learns the recipe and probably knows some of the context, but by the third generation likely much of the context is gone. So only the recipe i.e. the process exists.

And we see this in organisations too, where in building the processes, we lighten the burden of rediscovering the answer every time. Like a shortcut, we remove the need to think about the context, and eventually the organisation can forget the problem the process was meant to address. As a result, when you ask the organisation why they do certain things in a certain way, the answer could well be, “We don’t know. It has always been this way.”

It is a problem if no one is asking if the current process is still solving the problem it was designed to solve. An obsolete process does not merely drain resources. Given time, the organisation may start to equate following the process with having the capability to produce the desired outcome.

Consider this: Someone who understands the problem may realise that the process no longer serves its purpose and choose to do something different. But because the organisation views deviation from established process as a bad thing and actively discourages non-compliance, the obsolete process now prevents adaptation and improvement too.

The irony becomes obvious: what was created to make the organisation less dependent on individuals can eventually make the organisation more dependent on yesterday’s assumptions.

How does a novice become Grandma?

Definitely not by receiving a more detailed recipe. Instead, cooking repeatedly and varying the conditions by using different cuts of meat, different souring agents or increasing the volume. Every mistake becomes an opportunity to learn how to recover. Gradually, the novice starts to understand the effect of different interventions and learns what the dish should look, smell and taste like at different stages. The goal is no longer simply to follow Grandma’s recipe, but to understand the dish well enough to adapt as she does.

There is a parallel to how talent should be developed in an organisation. Good managers help develop someone by exposing them to a variety of assignments: managing a larger team, a different client, fewer resources, an ambiguous problem, a situation where the standard process does not work.

The thing to watch is not simply whether they succeed in every assignment. It is how they interpret the situation, what they choose to do, what happens as a result, and what they learn from it. Changing the conditions gives you a chance to see whether someone understands the reasoning behind what they have learnt, or is simply repeating what worked before.

Processes are important but they are not capabilities. The real test is not whether people can follow a process when everything goes according to plan. It is whether they know what to do when things don’t.

Grandma’s curry

It has always been this way

How does a novice become Grandma?

Further reading