Food for Thought

Let’s finish implementing the S.I.T. method of Attribute Dependency (AD). As you may recall, we began using attributes, or descriptions of the components. We didn’t just talk about the food but about the price of the food and the temperature of the food. Imagine basing the price on the food on how hot the food is when it’s served or on its weight or measurement. Attribute Dependency helps us to think in new ways and discover new relationships.

Let’s continue with another one of your components – your staff. Some of the attributes might be:

· The age of your staff

· The height of your staff

· The weight of your staff

· The hair color of your staff

Currently there is no relationship between the attributes of your staff and the food you served in your restaurant. But imagine there was a dependency. Instead of serving food in the standard color, the food that you served depended on the hair color of staff member serving the food. Or imagine the age of the wine offered that night was the same of the age of the staff member who served it. Now I know these ideas seem pretty silly, but in reality Attribute Dependency is extremely useful and the more you practice it, the better you will get.

One of the key steps in using all of the S.I.T. innovation templates is to identify your Closed World. In an earlier blog we described the Closed World and the idea that in order to discover creative ideas one should look inward rather than outward. Instead of googling “random new idea” one mustn’t look farther than the kitchen table. By searching close in rather than farther away, one will be pleasantly surprised to find that the creative solution really was at your fingertips all along.

It’s the same with AD. Before you start, define your closed world. Do you want to reimagine your entire menu or just the main dish? If it’s the main dish, list all of the attributes of a main dish and find new relationships that weren’t there. Until this point, you offered a standard array of main dishes but your menu was pretty constant. Instead I want you to imagine constantly varying your menu and choosing what was on it based on what food has been eaten by a recent Instagramer of food blogger.

Thinking differently is what S.I.T is all about. I hope I’ve given you some food for thought - even if it isn’t all food, but just the main dish