Failure is the engine, and the chefs doing the most original work are the most comfortable with it. One told me his kitchen fails four times out of five when trying something new. The failures are the cost of the one success, and often the seed of a different success the experiment was never aiming at.
Of the three disciplines behind creative work in a serious kitchen, failure is the one leadership writing discusses least and the one the chefs I interviewed discussed with the most matter of fact comfort. They did not describe it as a risk to be managed. They described it as the normal daily condition of doing anything new.
Matthew Orlando, then chef and owner of Amass in Copenhagen, put a number on it. When his kitchen tried new things, it failed eighty percent of the time. Four misses for every dish that landed, and he treated the four as the price of the one.
“You cannot be afraid of failure. Failure means learning and learning means progression. I embrace failure and criticism. There is always something to be learned from both.” Matthew Orlando, then chef and owner of Amass, Copenhagen
A leader who flinches at an eighty percent failure rate will, by definition, run a kitchen that operates safely inside what it already knows. The food will be good. It will never be new.
The chefs were also precise about where failure is allowed to happen. Albert Adrià, then chef of Tickets and the elBarri group in Barcelona, told me that experiments are necessary precisely because they produce mistakes, and that you do not experiment on customers. The development kitchen absorbs the misses. The dining room gets the result. Adrià added something I have thought about since: the feeling of success in creative work is unsettled because there is no goal in mind. The chef is reaching for something the chef cannot yet name, and the blank slate is the precondition for the new rather than its enemy. The chef who needs to know in advance what the dish will look like produces the old dish in different clothing.
Jonnie Boer, chef and co-owner of De Librije in Zwolle, described the team sessions where his kitchen worked through a year of ideas from his notebook. Some of them collapsed entirely. Others were a single ingredient away from something remarkable, and the session was where that ingredient was found.
“Some of them turn into complete disasters, but we always manage to discover new, exciting combinations.” Jonnie Boer, chef and co-owner, De Librije, Zwolle
Aaron Silverman of Pineapple and Pearls and Rose’s Luxury in Washington, DC, gave me the sentence I use to frame the whole subject. The willingness to let failures take you in a different direction and guide you to success is, in his words, the essence of creativity. The chef who treats a failed experiment as feedback can often see in it the seed of a success the experiment was not aiming at. The chef who treats it as evidence of personal inadequacy will not look at the result long enough to find the seed.
The same posture produced Orlando’s most distinctive work. A constraint most kitchens would call a limitation, a commitment to cutting waste, became his starting point. The kitchen put every scrap of trim through fermentation, pickling and drying to extract the flavors locked inside, cut landfill waste by three quarters and began building dishes from the by products backward, with the perfect piece of fish the last thing to reach the plate. None of that emerges without a long run of attempts that did not work.
For a leader the lesson is about reaction more than policy. A team learns quickly whether a failed experiment is met with curiosity or irritation, and adjusts how much it brings forward accordingly. The kitchens that innovate are the ones where the chef’s first response to a miss is to ask what it taught.
Chapter 6, The Creative Act, places failure alongside range and constraint as the three disciplines of creative work, and Chapter 7, In Pursuit of Perfection, follows Boer through the year his kitchen received its first Michelin star and a damaging review in the same season.