One Word Suggestion Podcast: Pizza!

Ever think about what it takes to make a pizza?

First, there’s all the people involved – farmers, butchers, cheesemakers, truck drivers, marketers, chefs, delivery drivers and of course, customers.

And then there are all the processes involved. Let’s start with the crust. It’s made mostly of flour – from wheat grown by a farmer, milled by a miller, packaged by someone else, transported by someone else, sold by someone else yet again, before it eventually gets used by Luigi.

And Luigi also bought eggs that ended up in the dough as a result of yet another set of collaborators including a different farmer, a refrigerated truck driver, a bunch of other people, and of course chickens. This goes for the salt, yeast and all the other ingredients it takes to make a decent pizza crust.

And we haven’t even started on the sauce and toppings

The level of collaboration, communication and shared expertise it takes to make a pizza is staggering. And putting together a pizza is deliciously simple when compared to say, putting together a Boeing 747.

Whatever your business, whatever your product, chances are there are people and processes involved and if those people and processes don’t work together, can’t communicate effectively, or innovate efficiently – your pizza will taste like cardboard, and your plane will crash.

But what does pizza have to do with improv?

Well, if you wanted to invent a new pizza you could use “yes, and” or divergent thinking to come up with all the toppings that haven’t tried yet, and then use convergent thinking to land on the next big pizza trend, anchovy and beetroot for example.

Whether not that sounds delicious is irrelevant. As Peter Diamandis famously said, “the day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea. And crazy ideas are very risky to attempt.”

Improv teaches you to take risks, to experiment, to embrace failure, and explore what’s possible. Trying new things on a pizza, the stakes are low. But on the job, we tend not to take risks at all because if things go wrong, we get burned. But if you don’t try, you’ll be stuck eating boring old Margheritas for the rest of your career.

Speaking of which, even how we eat pizza is a lesson in improvisation and working together as an ensemble. Who gets the slightly larger slice? Who gets the last slice? Who will pay for it? If it’s getting delivered who will answer the door and who will set the table? Who will grab the beers? Is there gonna be salad? The point is, an improvisational approach to teamwork can even make mealtime a lot more pleasant, let alone work time.

To take this analogy to its final conclusion, if you’re not making delicious pizza in your business, or the crust keeps burning, or the distribution of toppings feels inequitable, or nobody can agree on which kind to order in the first place, maybe your team needs new tools for communication and collaboration.

And if you think anchovy and beetroot pizza sounds good, maybe you need new tools for innovation too, because those two things do not belong together.

Just like an improv show, a simple slice of pizza is the result of a multitude of people and processes playing together to deliver the whole.

Just don’t expect me to eat it if its got anchovies and beetroot on top.