VAUGHN TAN

Winner of the Financial Times ‘Business Book Award’

Innovation is how businesses stay ahead of the competition and adapt to market conditions that change in unpredictable and uncertain ways. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, high-end cuisine underwent a profound transformation. Once an industry that prioritized consistency and reliability, it turned into one where constant change was a competitive necessity. A top restaurant’s reputation and success have become so closely bound up with its ability to innovate that a new organizational form, the culinary research and development team, has emerged. The best of these R&D teams continually expand the frontiers of food—they invent a constant stream of new dishes, new cooking processes and methods, and even new ways of experiencing food. How do they achieve this nonstop novelty? And what can culinary research and development teach us about how organizations innovate?

Excerpt from The Uncertainty Mindset 

Vaughn Tan is the author of The Uncertainty Mindset (2020), an extensive examination of how uncertainty can be used to drive innovation and adaptability. For the book, Vaughn opens up the black box of elite culinary R&D to provide essential insights. Drawing on years of unprecedented access to the best and most influential chefs and culinary R&D teams in the world (incl. Noma, Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck, Nordic Food Lab, and Jose Andreas), he reveals how they exemplify what he calls the uncertainty mindset. Such a mindset intentionally incorporates uncertainty into organization design rather than simply trying to reduce risk. It changes how organisations hire, set goals, and motivate team members and leads organizations to work in highly unconventional ways. A revelatory look, The Uncertainty Mindset (Columbia University Press) upends conventional wisdom about how to organise for innovation and offers practical insights for businesses trying to become innovative and adaptable.

Holding a PhD from Harvard University and Harvard Business School, Vaughn works at the intersection of innovation management, product strategy, and organisational design. His expertise is in designing (or redesigning) organisations to be more innovative and resilient to uncertainty in the operating environment. Vaughn Tan is a consultant, author, toolmaker, and professor of strategy at University College London.

In a previous life, Vaughn worked at Google in California on special projects (including spaceflight and big structured data) and consumer products (including Earth, Maps, and Streetview).

Awards

• Winner of the Financial Times ‘Business Book Award’

• Noma-Reischauer Prize

• Detur Prize

• Hoopes Prize

Advisor roles

• U.N Development Program

• Gates Foundation

• Data Protection Foundation (Executive Director)

• Aspen Institute

• The Fat Duck Group

• Wellcome Collection (to the CEO)

• MAD Copenhagen

Selected Press links: Scroll in, PWC’s Strategy & Business, LSE, Inside Outside