Advice

Why Chefs Understand Problem Solving Better Than Most Business Consultants

The best problem solver I ever met wasn't some high-flying consultant with an MBA from Melbourne Business School – it was Jimmy, the head chef at a little Italian joint in Fremantle who could turn a kitchen disaster into the night's special with nothing but leftover prawns, some dodgy tomatoes, and what I swear was pure magic.

I stumbled onto this revelation three years ago when my consultancy was hired to help a restaurant chain fix their "operational inefficiencies." Fancy words for "everything's stuffed and we're bleeding money." While the regional manager was showing me spreadsheets and process flowcharts, Jimmy was quietly dealing with a walk-in freezer that had died overnight, two no-show staff members, and a surprise health inspector visit.

By the end of that shift, not only had Jimmy served 180 covers without a single complaint, he'd also identified the root cause of their inventory wastage (dodgy supplier rotating stock), redesigned their prep workflow to save 90 minutes daily, and trained a junior chef to handle sauce production. No PowerPoint presentations. No six-sigma methodologies. Just pure, practical problem solving.

That's when it hit me. We've got problem solving completely backwards in the business world.

The Theatre vs. The Kitchen

Most corporate problem solving is pure theatre. We love our frameworks, our structured approaches, our "let's take this offline and circle back with stakeholders." It's all very impressive looking, but it's also slow, expensive, and often misses the point entirely.

Real problem solving – the kind that actually works – is more like running a commercial kitchen during the dinner rush. It's immediate, practical, and ruthlessly focused on outcomes. When the grill breaks down at 7pm on a Saturday night, you don't form a committee to analyse failure modes. You fix it, work around it, or find another way to get food out.

Here's what chefs understand that most of us have forgotten: problems are rarely what they first appear to be, speed matters more than perfection, and the best solutions often use whatever's already lying around.

Method 1: The Mise en Place Approach

Any decent chef will tell you that proper preparation and organisation prevents 80% of problems before they start. They call it mise en place – everything in its place.

In business terms, this means actually understanding your environment before problems hit. Not just the obvious stuff like knowing your processes and systems, but the weird little details that can save your bacon when things go sideways.

I learned this the hard way during a project with a logistics company in Brisbane. Their "problem" was late deliveries, but after spending a week with the drivers, I discovered the real issue was parking restrictions in the CBD that forced drivers to circle blocks multiple times, burning fuel and time. The solution wasn't better route planning software – it was negotiating loading bay access agreements with council.

The lesson? Start with your mise en place. Map out not just what could go wrong, but what resources, relationships, and workarounds you already have available.

Method 2: The Tasting Method

Chefs don't cook entire dishes and then hope they taste right. They taste constantly – adjusting, tweaking, course-correcting as they go. But most business problem solving treats implementation like a big bang event. We plan extensively, then execute once, and hope for the best.

This is madness.

Smart problem solving means building in multiple check points where you can "taste" your solution and adjust before it's too late. I call it the pilot-and-pivot approach, though that probably sounds too fancy for Jimmy's liking.

A manufacturing client in Adelaide taught me this one. Instead of rolling out a new quality control system across all production lines simultaneously (their original plan), we started with one line for two weeks. Good thing too – we discovered their staff needed completely different training than we'd anticipated, and the software integration was causing delays we hadn't predicted. What could have been a six-month company-wide disaster became a two-week learning opportunity.

Method 3: The Brigade System

Professional kitchens work because everyone knows their role, their responsibilities, and – crucially – when to help others without being asked. It's not about hierarchies or job descriptions; it's about shared accountability for the end result.

Most business problem solving fails because we treat it like a solo sport. Someone identifies a problem, someone else analyses it, a third person implements the solution, and then we all act surprised when it doesn't work properly.

The brigade method means involving everyone who touches the problem, from the start. Not just for their input (though that's valuable), but for their buy-in and their intimate knowledge of how things actually work versus how we think they work.

I've seen this work brilliantly with a Perth-based mining services company. Their "problem" was equipment downtime, but rather than having head office design a solution, they got maintenance crews, operators, and even the procurement team working together. Turned out the real issue wasn't maintenance schedules or equipment quality – it was parts availability. The solution involved changing suppliers, adjusting inventory levels, and training operators to spot early warning signs. Something no single person could have figured out alone.

Method 4: The Recovery Method

Here's where chefs really shine, and where most businesses completely fail. When something goes wrong in a kitchen – and something always goes wrong – the focus immediately shifts to recovery, not blame.

Dropped the main course? Fix it now, analyse it later. Sauce split? Work around it. Customer complaint? Sort it immediately.

But in business, we love our post-mortems and root cause analyses and lessons learned sessions. All useful stuff, but not when the problem is still happening and customers are still being affected.

The recovery method means triaging ruthlessly: stop the bleeding first, then figure out why it happened. This seems obvious, but you'd be amazed how many organizations get so caught up in understanding the problem that they forget to actually solve it.

A telecommunications company I worked with had this brilliant example. When their network went down across half of Sydney, the IT team wanted to run diagnostics to understand the failure before bringing backup systems online. Meanwhile, their customer service lines were melting down and business customers were losing money by the minute.

The solution was simple: bring the backup online immediately, then diagnose the primary system. Sometimes good enough right now beats perfect in six hours.

The Dirty Little Secret

Here's what I've learned after 18 years in this game: most business problems aren't actually that complicated. They just look complicated because we've wrapped them in so much process and politics that we can't see the simple solution anymore.

Chefs don't have that luxury. When the dinner rush starts, complexity is your enemy. Simple, fast, effective solutions are all that matter.

Now, I'm not saying we should abandon all structure and run our businesses like restaurant kitchens. That would be chaos. But we could definitely learn something from their relentless focus on practical outcomes over theoretical perfection.

The best problem solving training I ever received wasn't in a conference room – it was watching Jimmy turn disaster into dinner service, night after night. Maybe it's time we all spent less time in meeting rooms and more time where the real work happens.

Your spreadsheets and process maps are useful tools, but they're not the solution. The solution is understanding your environment, staying flexible, working as a team, and focusing on outcomes over process.

Even if it means getting your hands a little dirty in the process.

After all these years, I still think the best business advice comes from the most unexpected places. Sometimes you just have to be willing to listen to what the kitchen is trying to teach you.