The Uncertainty Mindset 2019-2020

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#42: Room for discovery

vaughn2nd January 2021 at 3:10pm

This issue is about the uncertainty mindset and my book (confusingly also titled The Uncertainty Mindset). The book might appeal to any reader who:

  1. Gets excited about shows like "Mind of A Chef" or "Chef’s Table"—and wants to go deeper into the world of high-end cuisine and particularly the labs where new ideas in food are transformed into reality.
  2. Loves restaurant culture and is captivated by food that feels brand new and unfamiliar—and wants to understand how teams of people in restaurants come up with different kinds of Brand New Food.
  3. Thinks it’s weird that high-end cuisine suddenly got obsessed with continual innovation after hundreds of years of treating it as an afterthought—and wants to understand the counterintuitive undercurrents that combined to create this movement.
  4. Wonders why conventional hiring processes create boring organizations with employees who can’t adapt to changing conditions—and wants to understand how to hire more adaptable, innovative, engaged employees.
  5. Wonders why conventional goal-setting exercises are so pointless—and wants to understand how to set goals so that teams become more effective, adaptable, and innovative.
  6. Wonders why conventional ways of motivating employees fail to keep them from resting on their laurels—and wants to learn how to design organizations which are continually hungry to learn and do new things, and are good at the work of uncertainty.

And secondarily about writing and how the path to publication was circuitous and arduous because the conventional publishing industry finds it hard to get behind difficult-to-categorise books aimed at multiple disjoint audiences.

You can find it here: #42: Room for discovery