Dessert, Happiness and Innovation

Wendi Bukowitz is a consultant and blogger who writes thoughtful business-related topics. In this essay, she talks about sources of innovation, using the food chemistry revolution in the Catalan region around Barcelona as an exemplar:

Wendy's post begins here:


"Reading about the dessert revolution that was sparked in Barcelona a decade ago made me think about how limitations and the lack of them combine in subtle ways to unleash innovation. Around the same time, I had come across the concept of synthetic happiness which also examines the interplay of limitation and freedom. I began to wonder: How much freedom and how much limitation create the optimal conditions for innovation? Are happiness and innovation somehow related?

The dessert revolution was kick-started by the molecular gastronomy movement – the ascendance of chemistry in the professional kitchen. Molecular gastronomy has been a rule-breaking phenomenon. Rules like the order of tastes, flavors, and sensations in a meal: the rules that say savory comes before sweet and hot before cold. Molecular gastronomy has appropriated the tools of industrial food-making and applied them to haute cuisine. Tools that extract essential oils from fruits and flowers and tools that blow air into liquids to create foams are used to transform food and the experience of eating. Suddenly, main courses are sweet and cold while desserts are savory and hot (one holy grail – hot ice cream). Textures and flavors upend expectations and suddenly eating dinner is an adventure.

What is most interesting about the culinary transformation in Barcelona is that it emerged from the realm of the pastry chef in regions of the world where the pastry chef does not dominate the food culture and from individuals who are mostly the younger or youngest sibling in a family business. As the younger or youngest sibling, these men were forced into the pastry chef role because it has lower prestige; the higher prestige roles went to the older siblings. In this region of Spain, the culture of dessert had been limited to a few custards and cakes. It is the antithesis of places such as France or Germany with dessert traditions that span tarts, creams, cakes, cookies, and more. Stuck in the pastry chef role, but unburdened by a well-developed dessert culture, these young pastry chefs experienced both limitation and freedom and an explosion of wildly innovative desserts have emerged from their kitchens and spilled into the rest of the meal, putting Barcelona on the culinary map.

What, you might ask, does innovation in Barcelona’s dessert culture have to do with happiness?

Let’s start with a definition of happiness that comes from Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness. Gilbert differentiates between natural and synthetic happiness. Natural happiness is how you feel when you get what you want – when you are not forced to face limitations. Synthetic happiness is how you feel when you change your view of how much it really mattered that you didn’t get what you wanted – when you are face to face with a big solid wall that stands between you and your aspirations and there is no way around it. In Gilbert’s TED talk (I encourage you to listen to it), one of his main points is that we believe that natural happiness is better than synthetic happiness. But evidence suggests that both kinds of happiness make us equally happy. That turns out to be a very good thing because most of the happiness we experience is synthetic. Few of us go through life without experiencing setbacks or bumping into limits.

Gilbert then moves on to describe the series of non-conscious cognitive processes that allow human beings to revise our view of the meaning of certain experiences. Gilbert calls this capacity a psychological immune system and it is essential to synthesizing happiness. We might not need these processes so much if we weren’t also blessed with a capacity to simulate experiences before we have them thanks to our frontal cortex. This unique aspect of our brain structure allows us to imagine outcomes from situations before we actually experience them and guides us to make certain choices. For example, presented with a choice between eating mud or a nice warm buttery croissant, we will choose to eat the croissant because we imagine that we will be happier doing so (good choice!). However, there are many more instances where what we imagine will make us happy and how happy we report feeling after we have had the experience suggest that we really don’t have a clue.

Gilbert cites several different experiments – most of them share similar characteristics. Groups that have what most people would call a lousy experience (becoming a paraplegic) and groups that have a terrific experience (winning the lottery) are basically as happy or unhappy as they were before the experience after some time has passed (sometimes as little as 3 months). People who were generally happy before becoming paraplegics dig something positive out of the experience as awful as it is. They synthesize happiness (make lemonade out of lemons). Even in less dire circumstances, we tend to be poor predictors of what will make us happy. And, as mentioned earlier, we tend to believe that natural happiness – not having to deal with limitations, having ultimate freedom – is better than synthetic happiness. But, it turns out that this is not the case.

To demonstrate this fact, Gilbert describes another set of experiments in which students are allowed to select a print of a photograph that they can keep. (I’m going to simplify the experiment design here, go to his TED talk for the more complete description.) Some students are told that they cannot change their minds – they must keep the photo print they choose. Other students are allowed to have several days to think it over. You can probably already guess which group turns out to be happiest with their paintings several weeks later. Yes, it’s the group that didn’t get to think it over; the group that had to deal with limitations. Freedom to choose – the ability to make up your mind and change your mind – may be the friend of natural happiness but it is the enemy of synthetic happiness.

When we think about innovation we often imagine that it requires a completely unbounded intellectual space in which we are free to explore anything and everything, a space in which we will find something new and exciting. Gilbert says that this is the prevailing view of natural happiness – it is something that we must find. Somehow we believe that this approach – that of seeking in complete freedom – and the happiness and innovations that emerge from it are the best kind. But what if another equally valid and productive path to innovation is more comparable to synthetic happiness? The same path that the young pastry chefs in Barcelona experienced – faced with limitations and only afforded certain degrees of freedom. That would be especially good news since few organizations operate without limitations. Start-ups lack resources and established organizations have brands to protect. How we synthesize happiness might provide an alternate way of thinking about how to pursue innovation – without contriving situations that bear little resemblance to the realities that most organizations experience. If natural innovation requires being out of the box, perhaps synthetic innovation can be produced inside the box as long as the lid is open. And, it is highly likely that they are both equally good kinds of innovation that will lead to happy results.

Sources:

•“Sweet Revolution,” Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, January 3, 2011
•Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy?, Ted Talks, sourced on January 20, 2011