Why Gordon Ramsay swears by the need to adapt

The latest episode of Gordon Ramsay’s new TV show ‘ Future Food Stars’ was all about proving contestants' Adaptability. Vying for £150k of Gordon’s own cash to invest in their business, the contestants readily embraced the change challenge of disappearing through a small hatch in the hillside into a cave system housing a cheese store. Given the challenge with zero notice, and with one of them persevering despite her claustrophobia, it looked like they were all off to a highly adaptable start. Hurrah.

But what emerged as a recurring theme throughout this episode was the contestants’ inability to stick up for themselves and their ideas. One member of each of the two teams, for example, correctly identified the most mature cheese that Gordon had tasked them to bring him, but both allowed themselves to be over-ruled. It was a similar story for everyone when it came to creating a child’s lunch menu along with its branding and packaging.

And when Gordon finally interviewed each of the losing team to decide who to cut, all of them claimed they’d had the right ideas but couldn’t achieve their vision because of the others. ‘You’re talking as if you weren’t in the room,’ said Gordon after one contestant pleaded that it wasn’t done the way she wanted to do it. Another contestant said that ‘I would have liked them to pass me the ball and I would have just got on with it’.

So what has any of this got to do with Adaptability? Well, there will always be 27 different versions of the brave new world that you can create. And when you’ve chosen one, there will always then be 27 different ways to get there. To make the right choice – and to make your adaptability count – you have to have constructive conflict skills because change is almost entirely a team sport.

Yes, these contestants demonstrated their ability to be up for a change challenge by quickly jumping into a tight hole in the ground, but they failed to convert that flexibility into high performance because they lacked the conviction and empathy to construct the psychological safety zone required to build it, break it and rebuild it better without breaking each other.

Watching others make mistakes is great TV. But in all my years of leading change, constructive conflict is always near the top of the list of skills that people lack. What these contestants demonstrated is absolutely typical behaviour found in organisations everywhere.

Finally, Gordon asked a question to one of the losing team: ‘Are you just happy to coast through this process, or make waves?’ I reckon that’s a question we should all be asking ourselves.

Rich Alderton from High Performance Change is an Adaptability Intelligence specialist, so why not contact Rich for an initial discussion?