Celery shawarma and creativity

What’s for dinner tonight? How about “The Hen and the Egg?”

Sounds simple enough to make, but only if you combine potato chips, a wild duck egg, slightly wet hay, salt, herbs, wild forest plants, hay oil, thyme, butter, and wild garlic sauce.

The Hen and the Egg is just one wild idea developed by chef René Redzepi and his team at noma, a three-Michelin-star restaurant I’m fortunate enough to have here in Copenhagen.

Restaurant magazine ranked noma as the Best Restaurant in the World in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2021.

Why? Because curiosity is at the heart of everything noma does.

Last week, I wrote about how a curious mind is a successful mind and noma exemplifies that belief.

Their homepage spells it out:

For the past twenty years, noma has been a restaurant ever curious to learn and grow—to be the best that we can be! Our origin is rooted in an exploration of the natural world, which began with a simple desire to rediscover wild local ingredients by foraging and to follow the seasons.

Noma stands alone in its creativity because it refuses to stand still. In fact, the restaurant closes for three weeks each quarter to develop a new seasonal menu.

They are on a never-ending quest to mix things up. What happens if we ferment celery and turn it into shawarma?

You may never be able to create a meal like one served at noma, but that doesn’t mean you can’t mix things up.

How about trying a different way to do meetings?

Maybe work with your team in a new location.

Look at those reports you’re handed each month - are they giving you what you need - or too much/too little?

Here’s something I do with my clients to help them stimulate creativity within themselves and their companies: I take them to museums for conversations.

We walk around and look at the exhibits together as we're talking about management challenges or personal issues.

It stimulates the conversation in a different way and I get to see a side of them that they don't necessarily show a lot of people.

There’s two reasons for this. First, most entrepreneurs don’t make time to visit a museum in the middle of the day, so it’s already firing off different creative parts of their brain.

And second, we usually end up talking about different things than just what it means to be a CEO or founder of a company.

These chats end up being really enriching for both of us.

So, you might not ever learn how to make elderflower mousse, but find your own way to stimulate creativity for you and your company.