(2024-03-01) Davies Gordon Ramsays Policy Nightmares

Dan Davies: gordon ramsay's policy nightmares. 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.

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.

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.

my seriously held view on how policymakers (particularly in the UK) ought to address a lot of seemingly wicked problems (particularly, regional development).

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.

the best starter-guide to Malcolm Sparrow’s “problem-solving approach to regulation” might be Gordon Ramsay’s iconic series.

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. (iterative)

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. feedback loop

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”.