The Fryer Wasn’t the Problem

Before I was a pastor, I worked a line in a restaurant kitchen. And there was a stretch of about two months where tickets kept coming back wrong.

Not catastrophically. Nothing that got anybody fired. Just a steady drip of small misses. A missing side, a wrong temp on a steak, cold food landing at the table because it sat too long in the window while somebody finished something else. Enough misses that the manager started noticing, and then enough that I started noticing, and eventually enough that it became the thing we talked about before every Friday rush like a weather forecast nobody wanted.

So we did what you do. We retrained the line on the ticket system. We posted a new checklist by the pass. The manager stood over the window for a week reading tickets out loud like a drill sergeant. Every one of those things is a completely reasonable response to a kitchen making mistakes. And every one of them worked for about three days before we were right back where we started.

I didn’t have language for what was actually going on back then. I do now, after reading Canoeing the Mountains and Leadership on the Line back to back. This is where it’s worth slowing down a bit, because I think most of us are running this exact same play somewhere in our lives right now without knowing it.

Two kinds of broken

Some problems have a known fix. Somebody, somewhere, already knows how to solve them, and your job is just to go get that person or become them. A deep fryer that dies mid-rush is like this. It’s stressful. It’s inconvenient. But it’s not a mystery. You call the repair guy, or the guy on staff who’s fixed it three times before, and forty-five minutes later you’re back in business. This is what’s called a technical problem. It asks something of your wallet and your patience. It doesn’t ask anybody to become a different kind of person.

Other problems don’t work that way, because the actual gap isn’t a knowledge gap. Nobody’s missing a fact or a skill. What’s missing is something harder to name. Maybe it’s trust, or shared purpose, or a willingness to be honest about what’s really going on. You can’t hire an expert to fix that from outside, because the fix isn’t a process you install. It’s a change that has to happen inside the people who are stuck, together, or it doesn’t happen at all. That is what’s called an adaptive challenge.

Here’s the trap, and it’s the whole reason this is worth about eleven minutes of your Tuesday morning. Adaptive challenges almost never show up looking like themselves. They show up wearing a technical problem’s clothes, because a technical problem is so much easier to hope for. A staffing issue. A training gap. A “we just need a better system.” So we treat it like a fryer. We throw a fix at it that would absolutely work if the diagnosis were right. And when it doesn’t hold, we don’t usually question the diagnosis. We just look for a “better fix.”

But there are two questions that cut through the fog and help us see this more clearly. And I use both now, wherever I am. First: does somebody already know how to fix this? If there’s a manual, a known process, a guy who’s solved this exact thing before, you’re probably looking at a fryer. Go get the guy.

Second, and the one that actually matters: who has to change for this to get better? If your honest answer is “someone else like a new hire, a better tool, a sharper checklist,” you’re still hoping it’s technical. If your honest answer includes “us, specifically, in how we’ve actually been operating with each other,” you’re standing in adaptive territory, whether you meant to walk there or not.

Back to the kitchen

Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t understand then. The tickets weren’t actually the problem. The tickets were the symptom of something nobody wanted to say out loud. The line had quietly stopped trusting each other under pressure. Somewhere in the months before, a few too many people had gotten burned covering for somebody else’s mistake. And the unspoken rule shifted from “we’ve got each other’s backs during the rush” to “get your own station through the window and let the next guy handle his own.” Nobody voted on that. Nobody announced it. It just became how the kitchen actually worked, underneath how it was supposed to work.

A checklist can’t fix that. Neither can a manager reading tickets louder. Those are both good tools aimed at the wrong gap. They assume the problem is that people don’t know what to do, when the real problem is that people had quietly stopped being willing to do it for each other. What actually would have helped, and what none of us tried, was naming it directly. Sitting the line down and saying, out loud, something’s broken between us, not on the ticket rail, and we’re not going to fix the tickets until we fix that. That’s a much harder conversation than a checklist. It asks something different of the people in the room than a training session ever asks. That’s exactly why we reached for the checklist instead. Three separate times. And each time called it solved until it was obvious that it wasn’t.

I’ve watched the same pattern play out in a factory shift that missed quota no matter how many new incentive programs came down from corporate. I’ve seen it in a church that couldn’t keep volunteers no matter how good the sign-up sheet looked. I’ve lived it on a sales team that couldn’t hit numbers no matter how much new training we bought. Different rooms, same trap. Somebody kept calling the repairman for a problem the repairman couldn’t touch, because that felt like doing something, and doing something always feels better than sitting with the harder, truer diagnosis.

So here’s what I’d actually ask you to do this week, in whatever kitchen you’re standing in. Next time something’s just not sticking no matter how many times you’ve called the guy, stop and ask the second question before you reach for another fix. Who actually has to change for this to get better? If the honest answer includes you, or your team, or the way your whole organization has quietly been operating with each other, that’s not a fryer. No checklist is going to save you. But naming it honestly just might be your best first step.