IDEO Chicago Sad Iron Chef Competition

One piece of advice I give people when they want to spin up a new workplace ritual is to build things people are already doing. You'll be going with the wind, not against it, so to speak, giving your new ritual a shot of grassroots energy from the beginning.

Which is how our Sad Iron Chef Competition came to be. Our designers were always on project deadlines or running between meetings, making it hard to find time for lunch, so we'd stock the communal fridge and pantry with staples like bread, cheese, lunch meats, lettuce, etc. One designer was notorious for his hastily created "sad sandwiches" — a slice of cheese with Sriracha on top, blech! — which quickly became a studio meme. But several others were more discerning foodies and casually whipped up Michelin-star salads and refreshing aguas frescas out of humble ingredients. This cheffy creativity, combined with the popularity of the show "Iron Chef," and IDEOers' natural love of team-based competitions bred (or should I say "bread"?) the idea for Sad Iron Chef.

The rules were simple. We recruited three two-person teams to compete. They had 20 minutes to make whatever they wanted out of our standard kitchen supplies, but they had to incorporate a secret ingredient we revealed at the start of the event. Their creations would be judged by a guest chef, professional food scientist, and picky eater. We turned our cafe into a Kitchen Stadium via posters and uplights and made custom awards out of cutting boards for Sad, Sadder, or Saddest Iron Chefs. Two designers, dressed in sequins and sporting head mics, interviewed the contestants and made color commentary throughout while a fake camera crew comprised of other designers, followed them around, live streaming the action on a big screen.

The competition was fierce and fun, soon going down in ChIDEO's history books. We planned to make it a yearly event, but a studio renovation the following spring and then the start of the pandemic the year after that put a kibosh on those plans. Once we were able to work in person again, our community and working patterns had changed so much that it felt out of sync to try to revive it.

We were able to use some "leftovers" from the event format, however, to craft other experiences later on. During the pandemic, members of our Workplace Experience team designed and hosted a remote team-building competition called the "Charcuterie Board Challenge," where a project team and their clients were challenged to create the most innovative charcuterie boards from whatever they had in their kitchens that day. We had custom cutting boards made and shipped to the clients that acted as game boards and tangible mementos of the virtual competition. My colleague, Katie Beach, was the event designer and MC. I played the role of judge.

While the virtual "Charcuterie Board Challenge" wasn't exactly the full-on, immersive production that the one-and-only Sad Iron Chef was, it was perfect for the moment: a scrappy creative re-jzhuzhing very much in the spirit of the OG event.