The Best Sushi Ever

"The sushi in this restaurant tastes terrible because the recipe is bad."

Did you ever think that while eating sushi in a restaurant?

I never did. That’s because we don't know the recipe.

We only know what is served in front of us, except if they put a funky ingredient like cinnamon sugar on our sushi, which ruins the taste. But that never happens, and then you would likely not pick it from the menu.

We don’t know the recipe, and excellent sushi is about much more than following a recipe.

In Amsterdam, there is this small sushi place I used to go to. It was run by an older Japanese couple. They were husband and wife, and the place was extremely basic and dated. People only came here because the sushi was delicious because the service and the atmosphere were pretty terrible. You would sit there at the bar while the sushi was prepared right before you by the husband.

That was the best sushi I ever had in the Netherlands (see picture). The tuna looks totally different from what you can get at most sushi places.

There was only one problem: afterward, I couldn’t eat sushi anywhere else. It just wasn’t the same. It felt like I was eating a diluted fast food version of the real thing.

The recipe only matters to the extent it looks, smells, and tastes good, and there is more to cooking than following a recipe.

You might be thinking now, why am I reading an article about sushi? Okay, let’s get right to it!

What Does This Have To Do With Agile and Scrum?

Let’s contrast this with the Agile and Scrum community. We’re obsessed with following recipes, and our market is flooded with cooks who know only how to follow recipes.

Most conversations in the community tend to center on the following:

“You didn’t follow the Scrum recipe!”

“How can I do X according to the Scrum recipe?”

“You should be following another recipe.”

“The SAFe recipe doesn’t work.”

Our community is obsessed with following recipes because following recipes is easy. If you don’t really know what you’re doing, like me, when I’m cooking, the best you can do is follow a recipe. But as you already know, following a recipe isn’t good enough. It’s a poor substitute for producing the best dish you can.

A great cook only cares about the recipe to the extent it produces the results they want: a delicious dish that looks magnificent. In fact, they must change the recipe. What you’re working with, like your equipment and your ingredients, may impact the recipe.

What matters is the result, not following a recipe that promises to deliver a certain result. Your primary concern should be the reality of how it tastes, smells, looks, and is presented. A recipe never fully captures this, meaning you must keep your eyes and taste buds on the dish.

When you’re learning how to cook, you entirely depend on recipes. When you master cooking, you know the recipes, what makes them work, and how you can deviate from them to possibly produce an even tastier result.

Stop worrying about the recipe and worry more about the dish you’re serving. Work with what you have, not the idealized state of what you should have. Monitor the dish more than the recipe and stop producing a diluted fast food version of the real thing.

You have to watch, taste, and smell, and that's more important than precisely following all the steps of the recipe because what matters is how it tastes, not how much you adhered to the recipe.

Never let the recipe stop you from creating a better dish.