Celebrating common sense
The Dutch and Belgians have a concept I love. A woonerf is a ‘living yard’: urbanised areas turned into narrow, often picturesque, streets where cars share space with bikes and pedestrians. Notably, there are no formal speed limits, or lane markings — common sense prevails and drivers use eye contact and human interaction to navigate carefully. There are 6000 woonerfs in Holland, and over 2 million people live in them.
I thought about woonerven when my government roads authority dropped a postcard into my letterbox telling me that a nearby residential street will be turned into an experimental ‘advisory bike lane’ street.
The street will now be one middle car lane (for both directions) with bike lanes either side, and parking also dotted around. When a car encounters another, coming face on, they should look for bikes around them, before steering left into the bike lane, and passing the opposing vehicle slowly.
I love this idea that we don’t need to be regulated precisely but, rather, encouraged to use context to make respectful decisions. After all, we are adults — give us credit for common sense and intelligence.
Question: When should you assume your customers (or staff) know the right thing to do, without having to explicitly tell them?
Ghost kitchens
Be honest. During the pandemic, have you ordered in more food than you would normally?
I think many of us have. But, do you wonder where that food comes from? Much of it comes from regular restaurants that have shut or downscaled their regular kitchens, but some comes from what are known as ‘ghost kitchens’.
These are of two types. Some aren’t attached to restaurants at all, but are warehoused behind anonymous walls. There are two near me: one provides Providoor meals to Andrew McConnell’s empire of excellent virtual restaurants (which largely mirror his physical ones); another is a sushi restaurant behind a graffitied Fitzroy wall which makes meals for various branded Japanese restaurants in the inner city, orderable via apps like Uber Eats and Deliveroo.
But the second type are even more fascinating. They’re a US phenomenon where, for a fee, existing restaurant kitchens prepare meals for virtual restaurants, in addition to their regular clientele. These virtual restaurants are often celebrity brands: think Mr Beast’s Burgers, or Mariah Carey’s cookies. It’s a way for a virtual food brand to build a national footprint literally overnight and, at the same time, provides a restaurant (many of which are on razor-thin margins) with a second (or third, or fourth) revenue stream.
What I find so fascinating about the concept is that it prompts us to ask the question, “What is our brand really about?” And, it turns out it’s rarely about the back-end, which in many cases is fungible, or inter-changeable. And, that’s what Robert Earl has done, at impressive scale, with his Virtual Dining Concept which now has hundreds of kitchens enlisted, cooking for dozens of virtual restaurant brands.
Question: What processes in your business are fungible and could be carried out by ‘ghost’ operators — and potentially increase your scale dramatically?
Drag’n’drop culture
When Charles Darwin visited the tip of South America in 1830 the captain of his ship captured four local people (a young man and woman, a teenage boy, and a child) as part of a bizarre social experiment.
A newspaper of the time wrote: “[Captain Fitzroy’s] intentions are to procure them a suitable education, and in the course of a few years, to send or take them back to their own country. He hopes that by their assistance the condition of the savages inhabiting the Fuegian Archipelago may be in some measure improved, and that they may be rendered less hostile to strangers. At present they are the lowest of mankind, and, without a doubt, cannibals.”
At first, things looked good. One of the ‘savages’ died from smallpox, but the others took English names, learned the language (by being enrolled in an infant school!), and one (“Jemmy Button”) even became a dandy, enjoying looking at himself in mirrors, admiring his waistcoat and cravat, and patent leather shoes.
Then, a year later, they headed home. The public showered Jemmy et al with gifts (cut glass decanters, fine linen) and they were accompanied by a missionary who was to stay with them in Tierra del Fuego. You can guess the rest.
The gifts disappeared, useless in their new home. Jemmy and the others rapidly returned to their Fuegan lives. And, the missionary begged after a few months to be returned to England. Each player in this saga (Darwin included) was trapped inside their original ‘model of the world’, on top of which a change of culture was literally like a change of change of clothes, merely superficial.
But it did make me think about the various ‘culture change’ initiatives that organisations undertake. What care should we take that, unlike Fitzroy, ours are not unilaterally imposed? How should we avoid the appeal of ‘dragging and dropping’ a desired culture onto our own? And, finally, how do we recognise the Jemmys — those who adapt quickly by ‘dressing up’ in the adornments of the ‘new’ culture, but as soon as those active reinforcements end, end up reverting to ‘old ways’?
Question: How can you grow desired cultures, rather than import them from elsewhere?
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Enjoy your weekend and I look forward to seeing you next Friday.
Andrew
interesting assimilation experiment example. I am working with indigenous cultures to support them reinvigorating traditional based management process. Those processes are very different and it will be interesting to see how it will come out. Both in Australia and Canada the Reconcillation agenda requires that we support this.