This is a comedy bit I’ve been doing for a while, but it also represents my seriously held view on how policymakers (particularly in the UK) ought to address a lot of seemingly wicked problems (particularly, regional development). The fact is that, just as “Allo Allo” (in which a local power-broker tries to play off occupation and insurgent forces against each other, occasionally displaying political sympathies but basically just trying to make a profit and enjoy a quiet life) gives you all the main insights of David Kilcullen, the best starter-guide to Malcolm Sparrow’s “problem-solving approach to regulation” might be Gordon Ramsay’s iconic series.
I was a superfan of Kitchen Nightmares in the early years; towards the end of the run, it became incredibly formulaic. But that formula itself is useful in context, because it lets me break down the approach using the same lines that Gordon delivered over and over again.
“Eight out of ten? Embarrassing. I would rate that quiche a three at best”
These bits at the start got quite hammy, as it was clear that everyone knew that their role was to pretend to be significantly more “in denial” than they really were, so that Gordon could deliver his amusing insults, and set up the family-therapy scenes for Act Two. But to begin with, in the good episodes where the Kitchen Nightmares related to the actual restaurant, it’s notable that Chef Gordon always started with a fact finding exercise. As well as eating the food, he spoke to the staff, researched the local market, talked to customers and so on. Before trying to do anything, you can see that he has a clear idea in his mind of the problem or problems that he needs to solve.
“I’ve called this meeting because I want you all to tell Dad what you really think”
After surveying the environment, he starts to drill down into the organisation and management of the restaurant, both formal and informal. One of the big themes of GRKN is always the tendency of people to try and cope with structural problems and live with them, and the way in which accommodations made (often made to avoid interpersonal conflict) start turning into hard constraints, shutting off whole avenues of possible solutions. In organisational and policy contexts, there isn’t usually quite so much family drama, but very similar issues can arise when a problem crosses institutional boundaries or budgeting units. It’s not for nothing that a bureaucratic conflict over responsibility gets nicknamed a “turf war”. In the Kitchen Nightmares model, a key stage is the gathering together of all the stakeholders to build a consensus that there is a specific problem which needs to be solved, and agreement that this is going to be the priority.
“Get away from the grill! I need you to expedite!”
There are only a certain number of things that can go wrong with a restaurant kitchen, I suppose. But even given that, it’s quite astonishing, if you binge-watch a lot of GRKN episodes back to back, how often it seems to be that a key problem is that the head chef or owner is spending too much effort on a particular station or on direct food preparation, rather than on co-ordinating the activity of the kitchen as a whole. Typically what has happened is that there’s some other problem in the kitchen (can’t hold on to staff because of a bad manager, family member put in a job they don’t want to do, etc), and the chef has responded by trying to overcome it with sheer hard work. But it’s incredibly inefficient to try to solve a problem like this by throwing more resources at it; as Gordon regularly points out, not only is the chef working their way toward burnout, they are generally worsening the frustration of the other employees by not letting them help, and cutting themselves off from information about what’s happening in the dining room. So the answer is to make the leadership step back (on one episode, I think Gordon literally handcuffed someone to a fridge) and allow the team to find a different way of working.
“Food is finally leaving the kitchen. But it’s being sent back just as fast”.
One of the interesting things about the best episodes of GRKN was that they often showed that the solution Gordon had come up with didn’t work, or that solving one problem immediately revealed the existence of another. This is a huge part of the Sparrow problem-solving approach; it’s written into the plan that there will need to be multiple experiments, and that some of these may involve finding out information that changes perception of the problem definition.
“Gordon’s team have worked through the night”
The thing that really made me think about this analogy is that as in regional development policy, Kitchen Nightmares always makes it clear that organisational change is a complement to capital investment, not a substitute. The whole show is about a big resource bargain – you’ll get a redecoration, a new hob and a point-of-sale system, but in return you need to stop being in denial and address the problems of the past.
“I’ve brought the local baseball team in to try out the new menu”
This is the final stage of Sparrow’s problem solving model. After identifying the problem, forming the problem team, getting stakeholder consensus and experimenting, you solve the problem and then tell everyone about it. Sparrow always makes it clear that if you omit the final step, then not only will you not be able to build on the success, you won’t embed the solution into the practices of the groups from which the problem team was drawn.
And that, unfortunately, is the final point of similarity between Sparrow problem-solving and Kitchen Nightmares; all too many regional and regulatory policy success stories have their equivalent of the sad voice-over at the end of the episode which goes
“In the weeks after Gordon left, the restaurant went back to its old ways … after six months, they decided to shut the doors”.
Apologies in advance as this isn’t directly related to your post, but I’ve been referred to you by your colleague Louis Ashworth at the FT, and based on what he’s said and the stuff of yours I’ve been reading in my own time, this is an issue I’d appreciate your insight in. Over the last few months, I have been working on a project to attempt to determine the optimal economic ‘niches’ of every country in the world. It’s a fairly trivial fact to say that the UK’s key economic strengths lie in services exports and research orientated businesses - while by no means is this the full extent of the UK’s highly diverse economy, you nonetheless aren’t going to be able to build an economic strategy around aeronautical engineering or whatever. Equally, it is also fair to say that Germany’s economy can be roughly defined as an advanced manufacturing economy, a niche it shares with Japan, and one that it could make sense for the likes of Turkey and South Africa to move into.
However, there is remarkably little literature I have found which seeks to chart these tendencies, and to determine which niches make logical sense for developing countries to move into (and thus begin figuring out how to get there). This is something I’ve been seeking to rectify, and I am gradually attempting to put together an attempt at mapping this for every country. Because of this, I was wondering if I would be able to draw upon your expertise for this issue - I have found your posts on issues such as the composition of the UK’s services industry enormously illuminating and have changed many of my views on this issue. With that in mind, would you be willing for us to get in contact and discuss this issue further?
Related to this, I think, is the idea that "innovative finance" can deliver desired outcomes without the required investment (and the associated opportunity cost). This drives everything from BOOT schemes (remember them?) to (the pop version of) MMT.