Reading for Lifelong Learning and Leadership: A PICPA Blog Series

Work Clean: What Great Chefs Can Teach Us About Organization by Dan Charnas

By James J. Caruso, CPA (inactive)

Imagine the noise, chaos, and frenetic activity of an upscale restaurant kitchen. Chefs fight for balance among multiple demands for simultaneous attention, relentless time pressure, and constant interruptions while assimilating an onslaught of new orders. The environment for today’s knowledge worker is a similarly frenzied zone, even if the chaos takes place on a computer screen at home and the noise is in one’s own head.

How are chefs able to thrive among the tumult and turn out delicious and aesthetically pleasing meals while managing stress? In Work Clean: What Great Chefs Can Teach Us About Organization,¹ Dan Charnas presents the chef’s practice of mise-en-place (translated as “put in place”), which is defined as “the preparation and assembly of ingredients, plans, utensils, and plates or serving pieces needed for a particular dish or service period.” Mise-en-place is a philosophy of “working clean” by practicing the values of preparation, process, and presence in the pursuit of excellence. Charnas explains how we can organize our minds the way a chef organizes physical space, how we can adapt a chef’s economy of movement to our own workflows, and how we can adapt the following 10 behaviors to knowledge work.

Planning – “Plan what you can so you can deal with what you can’t,” Charnas says. A thoughtful plan can help us face the unexpected in a state of “calm execution.” A particular practice that Charnas recommends adapting from chefs is integrating the to-do list and the calendar. The to-do list is only half the battle; the other half is time. We often fail to reconcile the two, fooling ourselves about how much we can get done in the time available. According to Charnas, to-do lists are collection tools, and calendars are for execution. We must get rid of the distinction between tasks and appointments, recognizing that both require time and presence.

Arranging space and perfecting movements – Knowledge work is not physical like a chef’s work, but we can avoid mental clutter by organizing our physical and digital spaces. We can organize our minds by giving a tangible structure to the intangibles of knowledge work. One example would be creating checklists, which Charnas calls “recipes for processes.”

Cleaning as you go – Once small things get out of order, chaos can result. Chefs train their cooks to wipe down their stations at the first sign of falling behind and losing control. A messy station results in a messy mind, and cleaning is the first step to restoring order. Like chefs, knowledge workers can end up with dysfunctional messes; respond by stepping back and regaining control of your physical and digital organization systems. But by cleaning as you go, you can maintain your processes and systems between tasks to avoid getting messy in the first place.

Making first moves – Chefs distinguish between what’s on their front burners and what’s on their back burners. The front burners need presence and attention; the back burners do not need continuous hands-on work, but do need to be started and maintained. Using this as an analogy for knowledge work, Charnas advises categorizing tasks as “immersive” (i.e., the front burners of hands-on work) or “process” (i.e., the back burners of work that can be delegated and relies on processes that continue in the background). While immersive work is focused and creative, process work also creates great value through the compounding effects of setting things in motion and unlocking, unblocking, and leveraging the work of others.  

Finishing actions – Like in a restaurant kitchen, batch similar tasks and continue one thing until it is done. Tie up loose ends, otherwise, as Charnas notes, the “accumulation of unfinished actions creates mental clutter.” Make sure you know what “done” means, though. Charnas tells an anecdote about a chef training an apprentice. The apprentice cut some carrots, put them in a container, sealed it, and said to the chef, “Done.” The chef said, “No, not done,” because the container was not yet labeled and in the refrigerator. We make the same mistake in knowledge work when we claim that we have a process for something, even though it is not documented.

Slowing down to speed up – When facing imminent deadlines, as chefs always are, rushing or panicking only results in sloppiness. Although it may seem counterintuitive, slowing down and being more mindful in the task at hand help avoid “freaking out or shutting down in the face of an avalanche of work.” Use anxious energy to metaphorically “clean” your personal organization systems and your workspace.  

Open eyes and ears – A chef is focused, yet still open and aware, somehow cultivating both an internal and external presence. Cognitively demanding work requires focus and is compromised by distraction. That is today’s knowledge work environment, and until it changes we can learn from the chef’s example: trust that we can create, even while being part of an interconnected system, remaining aware of what’s happening around us, and being interrupted.

Call and callback – The attributes of communication protocols in restaurant kitchens translate directly to the workplace: succinctness, clarity, active listening, asking the right questions, and using a shared vocabulary with clearly understood definitions. Consolidate streams of information, and foster accuracy and memory by confirming communication.

Inspect and correct – Excellence is not the same as perfection. Excellence is achieving the proper balance between quality and delivery. The best meal delivered late to the table will not be excellent in the customer’s eyes. Charnas calls perfection the quest for quality at the expense of delivery. But not aiming for perfection means settling for less – the quest for delivery at the expense of quality. Charnas calls excellence “a compromise between the two: quality delivered.” The pursuit of excellence requires constant vigilance – catching mistakes and issues, fixing them when they occur, and adjusting processes so they don’t occur again.

Total utilization – Chefs waste nothing: not food, not movement, not time. In knowledge work, we need to similarly conserve physical and mental energy and use time wisely so that we can live a balanced life. Charnas recommends having a set of “time-use” plans that can be deployed to fill in the small gaps between meetings that are inadequate for longer sessions of immersive work – lists of things you can do while waiting or when having trouble concentrating on something more complex. This is not about trying to milk every second of time; rather, it’s about valuing time and process – not only our own, but of the people we lead. We are obligated to put them in a position to succeed.  

¹ Published in paperback as Everything in Its Place: The Power of Mise-En-Place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind.

James J. Caruso, CPA (inactive), CGMA, is the CFO of ClearView Healthcare Partners of Newton, Mass., and a member of the Pennsylvania CPA Journal Editorial Board. He can be reached at  jim.caruso@clearviewhcp.com.

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